The Middle Kingdom

He was tempted to argue, to ask whether it was fair for those born into the Net, or into the Clay like himself, but after all the damage he had done with the file he felt it would be churlish to disagree. He looked past T'ai Cho at the elders. "What I saw today. That seemed fair, T'ai Cho." T'ai Cho looked at Kim and smiled. It was not a full capitulation, but still, there was good in the boy. A great deal of good. When he smiled, for instance, it was such a fierce, sincere smile—a smile from the very depths of him. T'ai Cho sniffed and nodded to himself. He realized now he had taken it too personally. Yes, he understood it now. Kim had been talking of systems. Of philosophies. He had let the abstract notion carry him away. Even so, he had been wrong.

"About the files, Kim. I had to tell the Director." Kim looked across at him, his eyes narrowed. "And?" T'ai Cho lowered his head. "And he has ordered their destruction, I'm afraid. We must forget they ever were. Understand?" Kim laughed, then bowed his head. "I am ordered to forget?" Tai Cho looked up at him, sudden understanding in his eyes. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. "Why, yes. I never thought. . ."

Forget, Kim thought, then laughed again, a deep, hearty laughter. As if I could forget.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Scent of Plum Blossom

THE BIG MAN came at Chen like an automaton, swinging and punching, kicking and butting, making Chen duck and bob and jump to evade the furious rain-of blows. Back and back he was pushed until his shoulders thudded painfully against the wall. He ducked, then kicked off from the wall, head first, aiming for the stomach of the big man. But he was too slow. The big man parried him, linking both hands to form a shield and thrust him down onto the floor. Then, before Chen could get his breath, he was yanked up by one huge hand and pinned against the wall.

Chen chopped down against the arm desperately, but it was like hitting an iron bar. The arm quivered but held him firm. Chen swallowed and met the big man's eyes, conscious of the power there, the control.

The big man drew back his free arm, his fist forming a phoenix eye—a feng huang yen ching—the knuckle of the first finger extended, ready to strike and shatter Chen's skull.

Chen closed his eyes, then laughed. "It's no good, my friend. I have no counter to your strength and skill."

Karr held him there a moment longer, his fist poised as if to strike, then relaxed, letting Chen slide down onto the floor again.

"Then we must work at it until you do."

Chen squatted on his haunches, getting his breath. He looked up at Karr, smiling now. "I can't see why. There's only one of you, Shih Karr. And you're on my side. For which I thank the gods."

Karr's sternness evaporated. "Maybe now, Chen, but one day they'll make machines like me. I guarantee it. Things like those copies that came from Mars. Even now, I'd warrant, they're working on them somewhere. I'd rather find an answer now than wait for them to come, wouldn't you, Kao Chen?"

They had spent the morning working out extensively, first with stick and sword and spear—kuai chang shu, too shu, and ch'iang shu—then with their bare hands, concentrating on the "Hand of the Wind"—feng shou kung fu—style that Karr favored. It was the first time the two men had seen each other in several months and they had enjoyed the friendly tussle, but Kan-had not asked Chen here simply to polish his skills.

After they had showered they sat in the refectory, a large jug of hot sweet almond ch'a on the table between them—a delicacy Chen's wife, Wang Ti, had introduced them to.

"How is young Jyan?" Karr asked. "I've meant to visit, but the Tang has kept me busy these past months."

Chen smiled and bowed his head slightly, but his eyes lit at the mention of his son. "Jyan is well. Only four and already he knows all the stances. You should see how well he executes the kou shift. Such balance he has! And when he kicks he really kicks! You should see the bruises on my legs!"

Karr laughed. "And Wang Ti?"

Chen looked down, his smile broadening. "Wang Ti is Wang Ti. Like the sun, she is there each morning. Like the moon she shines brilliantly at night."

Again the big man laughed, then grew quiet. "I hear you have news, Chen. The very best of news."

Chen looked up, surprised, then smiled broadly. "Who told you, Shih Karr? Who ruined my moment? I wanted to tell you myself!"

Karr tilted his head. "Well. . . let's just say I heard, eh? You know me, Chen. There's little that escapes my notice."

"Or your grasp!"

Both men laughed.

"Anyway," said Karr, lifting his bowl in salute, "here's to your second child! May he be strong and healthy!"

Chen raised his bowl. "Thank you, my friend." He sipped, then looked directly at Karr. "This is very pleasant, Shih Karr. We do this too little these days. But tell me, why am I here? Is there a job for me? Something you want me to do?"

Karr smiled. "There might be."

"Might be? Why only might?"

The big man looked down, then reached across and filled his bowl again. "IVe a lead on DeVore. I think I know where he is."

Chen laughed, astonished. "DeVore? We've found him?"

"Maybe. I've trailed him three years since he evaded us at Nanking spaceport. Three years, Chen. I've tracked down eight of the ten men who helped him get away that day, but not one of them knew a thing, not one of them helped me get a fraction closer to the man I wanted. But now things have changed—now I think I have him."

Chen frowned. "Then what's the problem? Why don't you just go in and finish him off?"

Karr sniffed deeply. "It's difficult. The T'ang wants him alive, you see. He wants DeVore to stand trial. If possible to provide us with conclusive evidence against the other Dispersionists."

"I see. Even so, what stops you from taking him?"

"The House. The stink they would make if we went in and took the wrong man."

Chen shook his head. Still he didn't understand.

"The man we believe to be DeVore is an overseer. Understand me, Chen? On one of the big East European plantations. And that's a House appointment. If we go barging in there mistakenly, the Dispersionists would have a field day attacking us for our heavy-handedness. And things are critical at the moment. The House is finely balanced and the Seven daren't risk that balance, even for DeVore. So we must be certain this Overseer Bergson is our man."

"How certain?"

"As certain as a retinal print could make us."

Chen looked down into his ch'a and laughed. "And how do we do that?" He looked back up at Karr. "Do you think DeVore will sit there calmly while we check him out?"

Karr hesitated, then he gave a tiny laugh and nodded, meet-

ing his friend's eyes again. "Maybe. Maybe that's just what he'll do. You see, Chen, that's where I thought you might come in."

T O L O N E N watched his nine-year-old daughter run from the sea, her head thrown back, exhilarated. Behind her the waves broke white on the dark sand. Beyond, the distant islands were dim shapes of green and brown in the haze. Jelka stood there at the water's edge, smoothing her small, delicate hands through her hair. Long, straight hair like her mother's, darkened by the water. Her pure white costume showed off her winter tan, her body sleek, childlike.

She saw him there and smiled as she came up the beach toward him. He was sitting on the wide, shaded patio, the breakfast things still on the table before him. The Han servant had yet to come and clear it all away. He set down his book, returning her smile.

"What's it like?" he called to her as she came near.

"Wonderful!" Her laughter rippled in the air. "You should join me. It would do you good."

"Well. . ." He shrugged. Maybe he would.

She sprawled in the lounger opposite him. A young animal, comfortable in her body. Unselfconscious. He looked at her, conscious more than ever that she was the image of her mother. Especially now, like this.

He had met her mother on an island much like this. On the far side of the world from where he now sat. One summer almost thirty years before.

He had been a general even then. The youngest in the service of the Seven and the ablest. He had gone to Goteborg to see his father's sister, Hanna. In those days he made the trip twice a year, mindful of the fact that Hanna had looked after him those times his mother had been ill.

For once he had had time to stay more than a day, and when Hanna had suggested they fly up to Fredrikstad and visit the family's summer home, he had agreed at once. From Fredrikstad they had taken a motor cruiser to the islands south of the City.

He had thought they would be alone on the island; he, Hanna, and her two sons. But when the cruiser pulled up at the jetty, he saw that there were others there already. He had gone inside, apprehensive because he had not been warned there would be other guests, and was delighted to find not strangers, but his oldest friend, Pietr Endfors, there in the low-ceilinged front cabin, waiting to greet him.

Endfors had married a girl from the far north. A cold, elegant beauty with almost-white hair and eyes like the arctic sea. They had an eight-year-old daughter, Jenny.

It had not happened at once. At first she was merely the daughter of an old friend; a beautiful little girl with an engaging smile and a warmth her mother seemed to lack. From the start, however, she had taken to him and by that evening was perched immovably in his lap. He liked her from that first moment, but even he could not tell how attached he would become.

When Pietr and his wife had died eight years later, he had become Jenny's guardian. Four years later he had married her. He had been thirty years her senior.

He returned from the bitter-sweet reverie and focused on his daughter.

"You've not been listening to a word, have you, Father?"

He laughed and shook his head. "Just reminiscing." He sat up in his chair and reached across to feel the ch'a kettle. It was lukewarm. He grunted and then shouted for the servant.

"I was just saying, we ought to go home. It seems time. Don't you think?"

He looked sharply at her, then, confused by what she had said, shook his head. It was not so much a negative as an acknowledgment that he had not considered the matter. Go home? Why? Why was it time?

"Are you tired of all this?" he asked, almost incredulous. She seemed so happy here. So carefree.

She seemed reluctant to admit what she felt, but finally she answered him. "I'm happy enough. But it's not me I'm thinking of, it's you. This place is no good for you. You're going soft here. Wasting away before your time." She looked up at him, real love, real concern, in her young eyes. "I want you to be as you were. I don't want you to be like this. That's all. . . ."

He couldn't argue with that. He felt it in himself. Each day it seemed to get worse. Sitting here with nothing to do. Ordered to do nothing. He felt more and more restless as the months passed; more and more impotent. That was the worst of exile.

"What can I do? I have to be here."

She could feel the bitterness in his voice, see the resignation in his hunched shoulders. It hurt her to be witness to such things. But for once she could help him. For once she had balm for his wounds.

"Where is that bloody servant!" he cried out, anger and frustration boiling over into his words, his actions. He turned in his chair and yelled for service. She waited for him to finish, then told him that she had sent the servant away earlier.

"I want to talk to you."

He looked at her, surprised and amused by her actions, by the grown-up tone of her voice. "Talk, eh? What about?"

She looked away, stared out at the sea, the distant islands of the Kepulauan Barat Daya. "This is beautiful, isn't it? The colors of the sky and sea. But it's the wrong kind of beauty. It doesn't. . ." She struggled for some way of expressing what she was feeling, then shook her head.

He knew what she meant, though. It was beautiful. But it was a soft, pearled beauty. It didn't touch his soul the way the fjords, the mountains, touched him. The unvarying warmth, the mists, the absence of seasonal change—these things irked him.

"I wish . . ." he began, then shook his head firmly. There was no use wishing. Li Shai Tung had exiled him here. He would live out his days on this island. It was his payment for disobedience. Exile.

"What do you wish?" she asked. She had stood and was waiting at his side, looking at him, her head on the level of his own.

He reached out a hand and caressed her cheek, then let his hand rest on her bare shoulder. The skin was cool and dry.

"Why should I wish for anything more than what I have?" He frowned as he looked at her, thinking that he might have been killed for what he had done; and then she would have been alone, an orphan. Or worse. He had acted without understanding that. In his anger he had gambled that the T'ang would act as he had. Yet it pained him greatly now to think what might have been: the hurt he could have caused her—maybe even her death.

She seemed to sense this. Leaning forward she kissed his brow, his cheek. "You did what you had to. Li Shai Tung understood that."

He laughed at that. "Understood? He was furious!"

"Only because he had to be."

He removed his hand, leaned back in his chair. "What is this, Jelka? What have you heard?"

It was her turn to laugh. "You were sleeping when he came. I didn't want to disturb you. I know how bad the nights are for you." She was looking at him in a strangely mature way; more mother than daughter for that moment.

He reached out and held her firmly. "Who, Jelka? Who has come?"

She reached up and took his hands from where they lay on her shoulders, then held them, turning them over. Strong, fine hands.

"Well?" he prompted, impatient now, but laughing too. "Tell me who it is!"

"General Nocenzi."

"Ah____" He sat back heavily.

"He's in the house. Shall I bring him?"

He looked up at her distractedly, then nodded. "Yes. It will be good to see Vittorio again."

He watched her go, then let his gaze drift out over the surface of the sea. Nocenzi. It could mean only one thing. They had come for his head.

Friends had kept him informed. They had told him of the growing demand for "justice" in the Lehmann case. Lately there had been rumors that the House was about to indict him for the murder. Well, now the T'ang had succumbed to that pressure. And he, Tolonen, would be made to account for what he'd done.

He shivered, thinking of Jelka, then turned to see that Nocenzi was already there, standing on the sand by the corner of the house, his cap under his arm.

"Knut____"

The two men embraced warmly and stood there a moment simply looking at each other. Then Tolonen looked down.

"I know why you've come."

Nocenzi laughed strangely. "You've read my orders, then, General?"

Tolonen met his eyes again, then shook his head. "Just Shih Tolonen. You're General now, Vittorio."

Nocenzi studied him a while, then smiled. "Let's sit, eh? Jelka said she'd bring fresh ch'a."

They sat, not facing each other, but looking outward at the sea.

Nocenzi noted the book that lay facedown on the table. "What are you reading, Knut?"

Tolonen handed him the old, leather-bound volume and watched him smile. It was Sun Tzu's Chan Shu, his Art of War, dating from the third century B.C. The Clavell translation.

"They say the Ch'in warriors were mad. They ran into battle without armor."

Tolonen laughed. "Yes, Vittorio, but there were a million of them. Nor had they ever tasted defeat."

There was a moment's tense silence, then Tolonen turned to face his old friend. "Tell me straight, Vittorio. Is it as I fear? Am I to pay for what I did?"

Nocenzi looked back at him. "Lehmann deserved what you did to him. There are many who believe that."

"Yes," Tolonen insisted. "But am I to pay?"

Tolonen's successor gazed back at the man he had served under for almost a quarter of a century and smiled. "You said you knew why I had come, Knut. But you were wrong. I haven't come for your head. I've come because the T'ang has asked to see you."

LI YUAN cried out and woke in the semi-darkness, his heart beating wildly, the feeling of the dark horse beneath him still vivid, the smell of plum blossom filling his nostrils.

He shivered and sat up, aware of the warm stickiness of his loins. Sweat beaded his brow and chest. The satin sheets were soaked about him. He moaned softly and put his head in his hands. Fei Yen. ... He had been riding with Fei Yen. Faster and faster they had ridden, down, down the long slope until, with a jolt and a powerful stretching motion he could feel in his bones even now, his horse had launched itself at the fence.

He threw the sheets back and, in the half light, looked down at himself. His penis was still large, engorged with blood, but it was flaccid now. With a little shudder he reached down and touched the wetness. The musty smell of his own semen was strong, mixed with the lingering scent of plum blossom. He sniffed deeply, confused, then remembered. The silk she had given him lay on the bedside table, its perfume pervading the air of his room.

He looked across at the broad ivory face of the bedside clock. It was just after four. He stood, about to go through and shower, when there were noises outside the door, then a muted knocking.

Li Yuan threw the cover back, then took a robe from the side and drew it on. "Come!"

Nan Ho stood in the doorway, head bowed, a lantern in one hand.

"Are you all right, Prince Yuan?"

Nan Ho was his body servant; his head man, in charge of the eight juniors in his household-within-a-household.

"It was"—he shuddered—"It was only a dream, Nan Ho. I'm fine." He glanced around at the bed, then, slightly embarrassed by the request, added. "Would you bring clean sheets, Nan Ho. I—"

He turned away sharply, realizing he was holding Fei Yen's silk in his hand.

Nan Ho looked to him then to the bed and bowed. "I'll be but a moment, Prince Yuan." Then he hesitated. "Is there"—he moved his head slightly to one side, as if finding difficulty with what he was about to say—"is there anything I can arrange for you, Prince Yuan?"

Li Yuan swallowed, then shook his head. "I don't understand you, Nan Ho. What might you arrange at this hour?"

Nan Ho came into the room and closed the door behind him. Then, in a softer voice, he said, "Perhaps the Prince would like Pearl Heart to come and see to him?"

Pearl Heart was one of the maids. A young girl of fifteen years.

"Why should I want Pearl Heart . . . ?" he began, then saw what Nan Ho meant and looked away.

"Well, Highness?"

He held back the anger he felt, keeping his voice calm; the voice of a Prince, a future T'ang.

"Just bring clean sheets, Nan Ho. I'll tell you when I need anything else."

Nan Ho bowed deeply and turned to do as he was bid. Only when he was gone did Li Yuan look down at the wet silk in his hand and realize he had wiped himself with it.

CHEN STOOD there in the queue, naked, waiting his turn. The sign over the doorway read DECONTAMINATION. The English letters were black. Beneath them, in big red pictograms, was the equivalent Mandarin. Chen looked about him, noting that it was one of the rare few signs here that had an English translation. The Lodz Clearing Station handled more than three hundred thousand people a day, and almost all of them were Han. It was strange that. Unexpected.

Beyond the doorway were showers and disinfectant baths: primitive but effective solutions to the problem of decontaminating millions of workers every week. He shuffled along, ignoring his nakedness and the nakedness of those on every side of him, resisting the temptation to scratch at the skin patch beneath his left ear.

A Hung Mao guard pushed him through the doorway brutally, and like those in front of him Chen bowed his head and walked on slowly through the stinging coldness of the showers, then down the steps into the bath, holding his breath as he ducked underwater.

Then he was outside, in daylight, goose pimples on his flesh. A guard thrust clothes into his arms—a loincloth, a drab brown overall, and a coolie hat—and then he was in line again.

"Tong Chou?"

He answered to his alias and pushed through to the front to collect his ID card and his pack, checking briefly to make sure they had not confiscated the viewing tube. Then he found a space and, holding the card between his teeth, the pack between his feet, got dressed quickly.

He followed the flow of people through, one of thousands, identically dressed. At the end of a long walled roadway the crowd spilled out into a wide arena. This was the embarkation area. Once more the signs were all in Kuo-yu, or Mandarin. Chen turned and looked back, seeing, for the first time, the wall of the City towering over them, stretching away whitely into the distance to either side. Then he looked down, searching for the pictogram he had learned—hsia, the crab. Seeing it, he made his way across and up the ramp, stopping at the barrier to show his ID.

The train was packed. He squeezed in, smiling apologetically as he made his way through, then turned, waiting.

He had not long to wait. The train was crowded and extremely stuffy, the smell of disinfected bodies overpowering, but it was fast. Within the hour he was at Hsia Plantation, stumbling from the carriage, part of the crowd that made its way slowly down the ramp and out into the open.

There was a faint, unpleasant scent to the air, like something stale or overcooked. Chen looked up, then looked down again quickly, his eyes unused to the brightness. The sun blazed down overhead; a huge, burning circle of light—bigger, much brighter, than he remembered it. Ahead of him the land stretched away forever—flat and wide and green. Greener, much greener, than he'd ever imagined.

He smiled. Wang Ti would have liked to see this. She had always said she would love to live outside, beneath the sun and the stars, her feet planted firmly on the black earth. As their forefathers had once lived.

For a moment Chen's smile broadened, thinking of her and Jyan and the child to come, then his face cleared as he put all thought of her behind. He was Tong Chou now and had no family. Tong Chou, demoted from the levels. Tong Chou. Until this was over.

The crowd slowed. Another line formed. Chen waited, patient, knowing that patience alone would carry him through the coming days. When he came to the barrier a guard babbled at him in Kua-yu. He shook his head. "I'm new," he said. "I only speak English. You know, Ying Kuo."

The guard laughed and turned to say something to one of his fellows, again in Mandarin. The other guard laughed and looked Chen up and down, then said something that made the first guard laugh crudely. They were both Hung Moo.

He handed the guard his permit, then waited while the man scrutinized it thoroughly and, with a show of self-importance, used his comset to double-check. He seemed almost disappointed to find nothing wrong with it.

"Take care, Han," the guard said, thrusting his card back at him.

He moved on, keeping his head down, following the flow.

"Chiao shen me ming tsu?"

Chen looked up, expecting another guard, but the young man who had addressed him wore the drab brown of a field-worker. Moreover, he was Hung Mao. The first Hung Moo he had seen here who was not a guard.

He looked the youth up and down, then answered him. "I'm sorry. My Mandarin is very poor."

The young man had a long face and round, watery blue eyes. His hair was dark but wispy and his mouth was crooked, as if he had suffered a stroke. But he was far too young, too fit, to be suffering from heart troubles. The crooked mouth smiled and the eyes gave Chen the same scrutiny Chen had given him.

"I'm Pavel," the youth said, inclining his head the slightest degree. "I was asking what they called you."

"Tong Chou," Chen answered, then realized how easily it had come to his lips,

Pavel took one of his hands and turned it over, examining it. "I thought so," he said, returning it. "You're new to this."

Chen smiled. There were things that could not be faked, like calluses on the palms. "I'm a refugee from the levels," he said. "When my father died I got into debt over his funeral. Then I got in with a shark. You know how it is."

Pavel looked at him a moment, his watery blue eyes trying to figure him; then his crooked mouth smiled again. "Come on,

long Chou. You'll need someone to show you the ropes. There's a spare bed in our hut. You can sleep down there."

Pavel set off at once, moving away from the slow-moving column of new recruits. Only as he turned did Chen notice something else about him. His back was hunched, the spine bent unnaturally. What Chen had taken for a bow of politeness was the young man's natural gait. Chen followed him quickly, catching up with him. As they walked along the dirt path Pavel began to talk, explaining how things worked on the plantation.

"How did you know I was new?"

Pavel glanced sideways at him. "The way you walk. The way you're wearing those clothes. The way you squint against the sun. Oh, a hundred little signs. What were you up above? You've strong hands. They're not an office-worker's hands."

"But not a peasant's either?"

Pavel laughed, throwing his head back to do"so. Chen, watching him, decided he liked the youth. He looked a dull-wit, but he was sharp. Very sharp.

"And where are you from, Pavel?"

Pavel sniffed, then looked away across the vast plain. "Me? I was bom here."

"Here?"

Pavel smiled crookedly and nodded. "Here. In these fields."

Ahead of them was a break in the green. A long black line that cut right across their path. The dirt track led out onto a wooden bridge. Halfway across the bridge Chen stopped, looking down.

Pavel came back to him and looked where he was looking, as if expecting to see something unusual in the water. "What is it?" he asked.

Chen laughed. "Nothing. It's nothing." But he had realized that he had never seen water flow like this before. Taps and baths and pools, that was all he had ever seen. It had made him feel strange. Somehow incomplete.

Pavel looked at him, then laughed. "What did you say you were?"

They went on. The field they had crossed had been empty, but beyond the bridge it was different. Long lines of workers—five hundred, maybe a thousand, to each line—were stretched out across the vast green, hunched forward, huge wicker baskets on their backs, their coolie hats making them seem a thousand copies of the same machine. Yet each was a man or woman—a person, like himself.

Where the path met another at a crossroads, a group of men were lounging by an electric cart. They were dressed differently, in smart black trousers and kingfisher-blue jackets. They wore black, broad-rimmed hats with silk tassels hanging from the back and most of them had guns—deng rifles, Chen noted— strapped to their shoulders. As Chen and Pavel approached, they seemed to stir expectantly.

Pavel touched Chen's arm, his voice a whisper. "Keep your head down and keep walking. Don't stop unless they specifically order you to."

Chen did as Pavel said. Even so, two of the men detached themselves from the group and came across onto the path, blocking their way. They were big, brutal-looking men. Han, both of them.

"Who's this, Pavel?" one of them asked.

The youth kept his head lowered. "This is Tong Chou, Shi/i Teng. I am taking him to register."

Teng laughed caustically and looked at his fellow. "You're quite a bit out of your way then, Pavel. Registration is back there, where you've just come from. Or have they moved it since I was last there?"

There was laughter from the men by the cart.

Chen glanced at the youth and saw how he swallowed nervously. But he wasn't finished yet. "Forgive me, Shift Teng. That would be so normally. But Tong Chou is a replacement. He has been drafted to fill the place left by Field Supervisor Sung's unfortunate death. I was told to take him direct to Acting Supervisor Ming. Ming is to fill out a special registration form."

Teng was silent a moment, then he stepped aside. "Get moving, then. I want to see you both in the fields within the hour, understand me?"

Pavel dipped his head, then hurried on. Chen followed, keeping his eyes on the ground.

"Who were they?" Chen asked, when they were out of hearing.

"Teng Fu and Chang Yan. They're the Overseer's men. Chang's fairly docile. Teng's the one you need to watch. He's a vicious piece of work. Thinks he's something special. Fortunately he knows very little about how this place works. But that's true of most of them. There's not one of those guards has any brains. Providing you keep your nerve you can convince them of anything."

Chen nodded. "You were frightened, though. You took a risk for me. I'm grateful for that, Pavel."

Pavel breathed deeply. "Not for you, so much, Tong Chou, but for all of us. They say the spirits of the dead have no shadows, but the deaths of Field Supervisor Sung and his wife have left a darkness here that no man can dispel."

Chen looked thoughtfully at him. "I see."

"I'll tell you sometime," the youth said, glancing at him.

They walked on. Up ahead of them, maybe ten li or so in the distance, the straight line of the horizon was broken by a building; a huge three-tiered pagoda.

"What's that?" Chen asked after a while.

Pavel didn't even bother to look up. "That? That's the Overseer's House."

As he watched a faint speck lifted from the fields close by the building and came toward them. A Security cruiser. The sound of its engines followed seconds later; muted at first, but growing louder by the moment. Minutes later it passed overhead, the shadow of the big craft sweeping across the fields.

Chen looked back at the Overseer's House and nodded to himself. So that was where he was. Well, Skih Bergson, he thought; I'll find out all I can about this place. Then I'll pay you a visit. And find out if you are who we think you are.

DEVORE LOOKED down from the window of the craft as it swept south over the fields, the fingers of one hand absently tracing the surface of the object in the other.

"What is that?"

The voice was cold; chillingly free of intonation, but DeVore was used to it by now. It was the voice of his dead friend.- He turned and looked at Lehmanris albino son, then handed him the tiny rose quartz snuff bottle.

"It was a first-meeting gift from Douglas. He saw me admiring it."

Lehmann examined it, then handed it back. "What did you give him?"

"I sent him a copy of Pecorini and Shu's The Game of Wei Chi. The Longman edition of 1929."

Lehmann was silent a moment, considering. "It seems an odd gift. Douglas doesn't play."

"No, but he should. All men—men of any ability—should play." DeVore tucked the bottle away in the pocket of his jacket. "Do you play, Stefan?"

Lehmann turned his head slowly, until he was facing DeVore. The albino's dead eyes seemed to stare straight through him. "What do you think?"

DeVore smiled coldly. "I think you do. I'd say you were a good player. Unorthodox, but good."

Lehmann made no reaction. He turned his head back, facing the front of the craft.

Like a machine, DeVore thought, chilled and yet strangely delighted by the boy. I could make something of you, given time.

They were flying down to the Swiss Wilds, to meet Weis and see how work was going on the first of the fortresses.

DeVore looked back out the window. Two figures trudged along one of the paths far below. Field-workers, their coolie hats making them seem like two tiny black wei chi stones against the crisscross pattern of the fields. Then they were gone and the craft was rising, banking to the right.

He had been busy since the meeting at Douglas's. The business with Lehmann's son had taken him totally by surprise, but he had recovered quickly. Using his contacts in Security he had had the mother traced; had investigated her past and discovered things about her that no one in her immediate circle knew. His man had gone to her and confronted her with what they knew.

And now she was his. A handle. A way, perhaps, of controlling Stefan Lehmann should he prove troublesome.

DeVore smiled and turned back to the youth. "Perhaps we should play a game sometime?"

Lehmann did not even look at him. "No."

DeVore studied the youth a moment, then looked away. So he understands, he thought. He knows how much of a man's character is reflected in the mirror of the board, the stones. Yet his refusal says a lot about him. He's more cautious than his father. Colder. More calculating. Yes, I bet he's very good at the game. It's a shame he won't play. It would have been a challenge.

The journey took them less than an hour. Weis met them in the landing dome, furred and gloved, anxious to complete his business and get away. DeVore saw this and decided to keep him—to play upon his fears, his insecurity.

"You'll eat with us, I hope, Shih Weis?"

He saw Weis's inner hesitation; saw how he assessed the possible damage of a refusal and weighed it against his own discomfort. A banker. Always, first and foremost, a banker.

"Well?" DeVore insisted, loading the scales against refusal.

"I have a meeting at six."

It was just after one. DeVore took his elbow lightly and turned him toward the exit. "Then we have plenty of time, eh? Come. I don't know about you, Shih Weis, but I'm famished."

They were high up, almost thirteen thousand feet, and it was cold outside the dome of the landing platform, the sun lost behind thick cloud cover. Landeck Base was some way above them on the mountainside, a vast, flattened hemisphere, its brilliant whiteness blending with the snow and ice surrounding it. Beneath its cover, work had begun already on the fortress.

"It's a beautiful sight, don't you think, Major?" Weis said as he stepped out onto the snow, his breath pluming in the chill air.

DeVore smiled, then looked about him. "You're right, Weis," he said, noting how Weis had used his real identity yet again. "It is beautiful." But he knew Weis was talking about the base up ahead of them, not the natural beauty of their surroundings.

They were on the eastern slope of a great glacial valley—a huge trench more than two li deep and "one across. It ran northwest, ringed on all sides by the brutal shapes of mountains. Cloud obscured the distance, but it could not diminish the purity of the place. This land was untouched, elemental. He felt at home here.

He stopped in the snowfield just beneath the base and studied the great shieldlike dome, thinking of the seven great Security garrisons ringing the Swiss Wilds, like seven black stones placed on a giant board. The T'ang's handicap. He laughed softly. Well, now he had placed the first white stone. The great game had begun.

Guards wearing full snow camouflage let them inside then searched them. DeVore submitted patiently, smiling at the guard when he handed back the tiny snuff bottle. Only Weis seemed upset by the routine.

"Is this really necessary?" he huffed irritably, turning to DeVore as the soldier continued his body search.

"It's necessary, I assure you, Shih Weis. One small device could tear this place apart. And then your backers would be very angry that we had not taken such precautions." He laughed. "Isn't that how you bankers think? Don't you always assume the worst possible case and then act accordingly?"

Weis bowed his head, ceding the point, but DeVore could see he was still far from happy.

A door from the secure area led out into the dome itself. Mobile factories had been set up all over the dome floor and men were hard at work on every side—manufacturing the basic equipment for the base. But the real work was being done beneath their feet—in the heart of the mountain. Down there they were hewing out the tunnels and chambers of Landeck Base from the solid rock. When it was finished there would be no sign from the air.

They crossed the dome floor. On the far side was an area screened off from the rest of the dome. Here the first of DeVore's recruits were temporarily housed. Here they slept and ate and trained, until better quarters were hewn from the rock for them.

DeVore turned to Weis and Lehmann, and indicated that they should go through. "We'll be eating with the men," he said, and saw—as he had expected—how discomfited Weis was by the news. He had thought that other arrangements—special arrangements—had been made.

DeVore studied him, thinking, Yes, you like your comforts,

don't you, Weis? And all this—the mountains, the cold, the busy preparations—mean very little by comparison. Your heart's in Han opera and little boys, not revolution. I'll watch you, Weis. Watch you like a hawk. Because youre the weakest link. If things go wrong, you'll be the first to break.

He went inside after them and was greeted by the duty officer. Normally the man would have addressed him as Major, but, seeing Weis, he merely bowed deeply, then turned and led them across to the eating area.

Good, thought DeVore. Though it matters little now, I like a man who knows when to hold his tongue.

They sat on benches at one of the scrubbed wooden tables.

"Well, Shih Weis? What would you like to eat?"

The cook bowed and handed Weis the single sheet menu. DeVore kept his amusement hidden, knowing what was on the paper. It was all very basic fare—soldier's food—and he saw Weis's face crinkle with momentary disgust. He handed the sheet back and turned to DeVore.

"If you don't mind, I'd rather not. But you two go ahead. I'll tell you what's been happening."

DeVore ordered, then turned and looked at Lehmann.

"I'll have the same."

"Good." He looked back at Weis. "So. Tell me, Shih Weis, what has been happening?"

Weis leaned forward, lowering his voice. "There's been a problem."

"A problem?"

"Duchek. He's refused to pass the funds through the plantation accounts."

"I see. So what have you done?"

Weis smiled broadly, clearly pleased by his own ingenuity. "IVe rerouted them—through various Security ordnance accounts."

DeVore considered it a moment, -then smiled. "That's good. Much better, in fact. They'd never dream we'd use their own accounts."

Weis leaned back, nodding. "That's what I thought."

Because of the vast sums involved they had had to take great care in setting up the routes by which the money got to DeVore.

The finances of Chung Kuo were closely knit and any large movement was certain to be noted by the T'ang's ministry, the Hu Pu, responsible for monitoring all capital transfers and ensuring the T'ang received the fifty percent due him on the profit of each and every transaction.

It had been decided from the outset that it would be safest to be open about the movements. Any attempt to siphon away sums of this size would be noticed and investigated, but normal movements—if the T'ang received his cut from them—would not be commented upon. It had meant that the T'ang would actually receive almost seventy-five percent of everything they allocated, but this had been budgeted for.

Weis and his small team had worked directly with the sponsors to set things up. First they had had to break the transfers down into smaller, less noticeable sums, then disguise these as payments to smaller companies for work done. From there they were rerouted and broken down into yet smaller payments—this process being repeated anywhere between ten and fifteen times before they finally got to DeVore. Again, it was an expensive process, but necessary to protect the seven major sponsors from being traced. Palms had had to be greased all the way down the line, "squeeze" to be paid to greedy officials.

Funded directly it would have cost a quarter of the sum DeVore had asked for. But the risk of discovery would have been a hundred times greater.

"You've done an excellent job, Shih Weis," DeVore said, leaning back to let the cook set his plate down in front of him. "I have asked Shih Douglas if he could not show our appreciation in some small way."

He saw how much that pleased Weis, then looked down and picked up his chopsticks, digging into the heaped plate of braised bean-curd and vegetables.

DEVORE WATCHED Weis's craft lift and accelerate away, heading north, back to the safety of the City. The man's impatience both irritated and amused him. He was so typical of his kind. So unimaginative. All his talk about The New Hope, for instance—it was all so much bad air. But that was fortunate, perhaps. For if they'd guessed—if any of them had had the foresight to see where all this really led ...

He laughed, then turned to the youth. "Do you fancy a walk, Stefan? The cold is rather exhilarating, I find."

"I'd like that."

The answer surprised him. He had begun to believe there was nothing the young man liked.

They went down past the landing dome and out onto a broad lip of ice-covered rock which once, long ago, had been a road. From that vantage point they could see how the valley began to curve away to the west. Far below them the mountainside was forested, but up here there was only snow and ice. They were above the world.

Standing there in the crisp air, surrounded by the bare splendor of the mountains, he saw it clearly. The New Rope was much more than a new start. For the Seven it would be the beginning of the end. His colleagues—Weis, Moore, Duchek, even Berdichev—saw it mainly as a symbol, a flagship for their cause, but it was more than that. It was a practical thing. If it succeeded—if new worlds could be colonized by its means— then control would slip from the hands of the Seven.

They knew that. Li Shai Tung had known it three years ago when he had summoned the leaders of the House to him and, unexpectedly, granted the concession. But the old man had had no choice. Lehmann's murder had stirred the hornet's nest. It was the only thing the T'ang could have done to prevent war.

Even so, none of his fellow conspirators had grasped what it really meant. They had not fully envisaged the changes that would come about—the vast, rapid metamorphosis that would sweep through their tight-knit community of thirty-nine billion souls. Science, kept in check by the Edict for so long, would not so much blossom as explode. When mankind went out into the stars it would not be a scattering, as so many had called it, but a shattering. All real cohesion would be lost. The Seven knew this. But few others had understood as yet. They thought the future would be an extension of the past. It would not. It would be something new. Something utterly, disturbingly new.

The new age, if it came, would be an age of grotesque and gothic wonders. Of magical transformations. Mutation would be the norm.

If it came.

"What were you up to with Weis back there?"

DeVore turned and looked at the young man. He seemed perfectly suited to this environment. His eyes, the pallor of his flesh; neither seemed out of place here. He was like some creature of the wild—a pine marten or a snow fox. A predator.

DeVore smiled. "I've been told Weis is a weak man. A soft man. I wanted confirmation of that for myself."

"What had you heard?"

DeVore told him about the tape he had acquired. It showed Weis in bed with two young boys—well-known Han opera stars. That was his weakness; a weakness he indulged in quite often, if the reports were accurate.

"Can he be trusted, then?"

"We have no option. Weis is the only one with both the know-how and the contacts."

"I see."

DeVore turned and looked back at the view. He remembered standing here with Berdichev, almost a year before, when they had first drawn up their scheme; recalled how they had stood and watched the sunset together; how frightened Soren had been; how the sudden fall of dark had changed his mood entirely. But he had expected as much. After all, Berdichev was typical of the old Man.

Beneath it all they were still the same primitive creatures. Still forest dwellers, crouched on the tree line, watching the daylight bleed away on the plain below, fearful of the dark. Their moods, their very beings, were shaped by patterns older than the race. By the Earth's slow revolution about the sun. By the unglimpsed diurnal round—cycles of dark and light, heat and cold. They could not control how they were, how they felt.

In the new age it would be different. There would be a creature free of this. Unshackled. A creature of volition, un-shaped by its environment. A creature fit for space.

Let them have their romantic image of dispersion; of new, unblemished worlds. Of Edens. His dreams were different and rode upon their backs. His dream was of new men. Of better, finer creatures. Cleaner creatures.

He thought back to the tape of Weis; to the image of the financier standing there, naked, straddling the young boy, his movements urgent, his face tight with need. Such weakness, he thought. So pitiful to be a slave to need.

In his dream of the new age he saw all such weaknesses eradicated. His new Man would be purged of need. His blood would flow clean and pure like the icy streams of the far north.

"It's magnificent. So pure. So perfect."

He looked across at the youth, surprised, then laughed. Yes, they were all much the same—all the same, primitive Man, unchanged by long millennia of so-called civilization. AH, perhaps, but this one. "Yes," he said, after a moment, feeling himself drawn to the boy. "It is magnificent, isn't it?"

Tblonen stopped on the edge of the inner arch, squinting into the darkness at the center, trying to make out the shape of his master.

"Heavy-handed monsters, weren't they?"

Li Shai Tung stepped out from the next archway. At a signal from him the lights were raised and the central amphitheater was suddenly revealed. It was huge, monstrous, barbaric. It spoke of a crude brutality.

Tolonen was silent, waiting. And while he waited, he thought about the pain and death this place had been built to hold. So much raw aggression had been molded into darkness here. So much warm blood spilled for entertainment.

"You understand, then?" said the T'ang, turning to face him for the first time. There were tears in his eyes.

He found he could barely answer him. "What is it, Chieh Hsia? What do you want from me?"

Li Shai Tung drew a deep breath, then raised a hand, indicating the building all about them. "They would have me believe you are like this place. As unthinkingly callous. As brutal. Did you know that?"

He wanted to ask, Who? Who would have you believe this? but he merely nodded, listening.

"However ... I know you too well, Knut. You're a caring man. A loving man."

Tolonen shivered, moved by his T'ang's words.

The T'ang moved closer; stood face to face with his ex-general, their breaths mingling. "What you did was wrong. Very wrong." Then, surprisingly, he leaned forward and kissed Tolonen's cheek, holding him a moment. He lowered his voice to a whisper. "But thank you, Knut. Thank you, dearest friend. You acted like a brother to my grief."

Tolonen stood there, surprised, looking into his master's face, then bowed his head, all the old warmth welling up inside him. It had been so long; so hard being exiled.

He went down onto his knees at Li Shai Tung's feet, his head bowed in submission. "Tell me what you want, Chieh Hsia. Let me serve you again."

"Get up, old friend. Get up."

"Not until you say I am forgiven."

There was a moment's silence, then Li Shai Tung placed his hands on Tolonen's shoulders. "I cannot reinstate you. You must realize that. As for forgiveness, there is nothing to forgive. You acted as I felt. I would need to forgive myself first." He smiled sadly. "Your exile is at an end, Knut. You can come home. Now get up."

Tolonen stayed on his knees.

"Get up, you foolish man. Get up. You think I'd let my ablest friend rot in inactivity?" He was laughing now; a soft, almost childlike laughter. "Yes, you foolish old man. I have a job for you."

•IT WAS a hot night. Nan Ho had left the door to the garden open. A gentle breeze stirred the curtains, bringing the scents of night flowers and the sound of an owl in the orchard. Li Yuan woke and stretched, then grew very still.

"Who is it?" he said, his voice very small.

There was a touch of warmth against his back and a soft, muted giggle, then he felt her pressed against him—undoubtedly her—and heard her voice in his ear.

"Hush, little one. Hush. It's only me, Pearl Heart. I'll not bite you, Li Yuan."

He turned and, in the moon's light, saw her naked there beside him in his bed.

"What are you doing here, Pearl Heart?" he asked, but his eyes were drawn to the firmness of her breasts, the soft, elegant slope of her shoulders. Her dark eyes seemed to glisten in the moonlight and she lay there, unashamed, enjoying the way he looked at her.

She reached out and took his hand and pressed it gently to her breast, letting him feel the hardness of the nipple, then moved it down, across the silken smoothness of her stomach until it rested between her legs.

He shivered, then looked to her eyes again. "I shouldn't. . ."

She smiled and shook her head, her eyes filled with amusement. "No, perhaps you shouldn't, after all. Shall I go away?"

She made to move but his hand held her where she was, pressing down against the soft down of her sex. "No ... I..."

Again she laughed, a soft, delicious laughter that increased his desire, then she sat up and pushed him down, pulling back the sheet from him.

"What have we here? Ah, now here's the root of all your problems."

She lifted his stiff penis gently between her fingers, making him catch his breath, then bent her head and kissed it. A small,

wet kiss.

"There," she said gently, looking up the length of his body into his eyes. "I can see what you need, my little one. Why didn't you tell Pearl Heart before now?" She smiled and her eyes returned to his penis.

For a moment he closed his eyes, a ripple of pure pleasure passing through him as she stroked and kissed him. Then, when he could bear it no longer, he pulled her up against him, then turned her over, onto her back, letting her hand help him as he struggled to find the mouth of her sex with the blind eye of his penis.

Then, with a sudden sense of her flesh parting before his urgent pressure, he was inside her and she was pushing back up against him, her face suddenly different, her movements no longer quite so gentle, her legs wrapped about his back. He thrust and thrust and then cried out, his body stiffening, a great hot wave of blackness robbing him momentarily of thought.

He slept for a while and when he woke she was there still, not a dream as he had begun to imagine, but real and warm, her body beautiful, naked in the moonlight beside him, her dark eyes watching him. The thought—the reality of her—made his penis stir again and she laughed and stroked his cheek, his neck, his shoulder, her fingers moving down his body until they were curled about the root of him again.

"Pearl Heart?" he said, looking up from where her fingers played with him, into her face.

"Hush," she said, her smile like balm. "Lie still and close your eyes, my little one. Pearl Heart will ease the darkness in you."

He smiled and closed his eyes, letting the whole of him be drawn like a thread of fine silk into the contact of her fingers with his flesh. He gave a little shudder as her body brushed against his own, moving down him, then groaned as he felt her tiny rosebud lips close wetly about the end of his penis.

"Pearl Heart," he said softly, almost inaudibly. And then the darkness claimed him once again.

CHEN leaned on his hoe, then looked up into the sky and wiped his brow with the cloth Pavel had given him.

"This is harder than I thought it would be," he said, laughing.

The young man smiled back at him. "Would you like some water, Tong Chou?"

He hesitated, then gave a small bow. "That would be good. I've a thirst on me such as I've never had before."

"It's hot," Pavel said kindly. "You're not used to it yet, that's all. You'll get the hang of it soon enough."

Chen rubbed at his back then laughed again. "Let's hope so. I've a feeling I'm not so much breaking the earth as the earth's breaking me."

He watched Pavel go, then got down to it again, turning the dark, hard earth, one of a long line of workers stretching out across the huge, two-li-wide field. Then, only moments later, he looked up, hearing raised voices from the direction Pavel had gone. He turned and saw the youth had been stopped by two of the guards—the same two men who had met them on the path the day before.

"What is it?" he asked the woman next to him, then realized she didn't speak English, only Mandarin. But the woman seemed to understand. She made a drinking gesture with one cupped hand, then shook her head.

"But I thought..."

Then he remembered something Pavel had said earlier. They were only allowed three cups of water a day—at the allotted breaks. Curse him, the stupid boy! Chen thought, dropping his hoe and starting across the field toward the noise, but two of the field workers ran after him and held his arms until he returned to the line.

"Fa!" one of them kept saying. "Fa!" Then, in atrocious English, he translated the word. "Pah-nis-men." Chen went cold. "I've got to stop it."

One of the older men—a peasant in his late forties or fifties, his face deeply tanned and creased—stepped forward. "You cannot stop it," he said in a clipped but clear English. "Watch. They will summon some of us. They will make us form a circle. Then the punishment will begin." He sighed resignedly. "It is their way."

On the far side of the field the shouting had stopped now and he could see Pavel, his arm held tightly by one of the men, his head bowed under the coolie hat.

"Shit!" he said under his breath. But the old man was right. He could not afford to get involved; nor, probably, would his involvement change anything. He was a field-worker here, not kwai, and his job was to get at DeVore. He could not risk that, even to prevent this injustice.

The bigger of the two guards—the one Pavel had identified as Teng—strode out toward them. He stopped and, hands on his hips, ordered a number of them over to the water wagon.

Chen felt sick. This was his fault. But he could do nothing.

Pavel did not look at him. It was clear he had chosen not to say why he had gone to the wagon. Without being told, the ku—the field-workers—formed a circle about the youth and the two guards. There was an awful silence. Chen looked around the circle and saw how most of them looked down or away, anything but look at what was happening at the circle's heart.

Teng's voice barked out again. "This man was disobedient. He knew the rules and yet he broke them." He laughed; a curt, brutal laughter. "He was stupid. Now he will be punished for his stupidity."

Teng drew the long club from his belt and turned to face Pavel. Chang smiled and thrust the young man forward at his fellow.

Without warning Teng lashed out, the club hitting Pavel on the back of the legs, making him fall down. The sound the boy made was awful; a frightened whimper.

Chen shuddered and gritted his teeth.

Teng stood over the youth now, smiling down at him. "Get up, Pavel. It's not over yet."

Slowly, his eyes never leaving Teng's face, Pavel got to his feet again. Teng's smile never wavered, but seemed to burn fiercely. It was clear he was enjoying himself hugely. He looked down at the club, then let fly again, this time catching Pavel across the side of the head.

The boy went down with a groan of pain. Chen could feel the indignation ripple about the circle. But still they were all silent. No one moved. No one did a thing.

Teng put the tip of the club against the young man's head and pushed gently, making him fall backward. Then he looked across at his fellow guard.

"Chang! Pass me the rod!"

This time there was a low murmur from the circle. Teng turned, looking from face to face, then laughed. "If there's anyone else who'd like a taste of this, just say. I'd be delighted to oblige them."

Chang went across to him and took the club from him, handing him a long, thin pole that was attached by a wire to a small box. Teng clipped the box to pne of his jacket pockets, then pressed a button on the side of the rod. It hissed wickedly.

Teng looked across at Pavel. "Drop your trousers, boy!"

Chen saw Pavel swallow awkwardly. The youth was petrified. His fingers fumbled at the strings that held up his trousers, then managed to untie the knot. Then he stood, his head drooping, letting his trousers fall around his ankles.

Under the trousers he was quite naked. He trembled uncontrollably. His penis had shriveled up with fear.

Teng looked at him and laughed. "We're a fine big boy, aren't we, Pavel? No wonder weVe no girlfriend yet!" Again his brutal laugh rang out. Then, cruelly, he touched the rod against the tip of the boy's penis.

Pavel jerked back, but Teng had not activated the rod.

Teng looked across at Chang and both men laughed loudly at the joke. Then Teng pressed the button and thrust the rod into the young man's groin. Pavel doubled up convulsively, then lay there as if dead. Teng must have had the rod set high, for the smell of burnt flesh was suddenly sharp in the warm, still air.

"You dirty bastard!"

The words came from Chen's left. He turned and saw it was the old man who had spoken to him earlier.

Teng had also turned and was looking at the man. "What is it, Fang Hui? You want to join the fun?"

Chang's voice sounded urgently from behind Teng. "Use the club, Teng Fu. The rod will kill the old fool."

But Teng wasn't listening. He walked slowly across to the old man and stood there, facing him, head and shoulders bigger than he.

"What did you say, old man? What did you call me?"

Fang Hui smiled bleakly. "You heard me, Teng."

Teng laughed. "Yes, I heard you, Fang." He reached forward and grabbed the man's face in one hand, forcing his mouth open, then thrust the rod inside, closing Fang Hui's teeth upon it. Then he moved his hand away. One finger hovered above the button of the box.

"You'd like a taste of this, Fang Hui?"

Fang's eyes were wide with terror. Slowly Teng withdrew the rod from the old man's mouth, a sadistic smile of enjoyment lighting his big ugly features.

"A good peasant is a quiet peasant, eh, Fang?"

The old man nodded exaggeratedly.

"Good," Teng said quietly, then kicked out, sending Fang sprawling.

The old man lay there, gasping. Chen looked across at him, relieved he had come to no greater harm, then turned and looked back at Teng.

It had been hard. Hard not to add his voice to Fang Hui's. Harder still just to stand there in the circle and do nothing. Pavel was stirring now. He lifted his head from the ground and looked up, his eyes unfocused, then let it fall back again.

Chang stepped up behind him, a cup of water in one hand, and poured it over the youth's head. "Is this what you came for, Pavel?" His action brought guffaws of laughter from the watching Teng.

Yes, thought Chen. I may have done nothing here today, but watch me, Teng. Be careful how you treat me. For I've every reason to kill you now for what youVe done.

He thought of what Pavel had told him of the murders and knew now it was more than rumor. It was what had happened. He was sure of it.

Yes. Every reason.

THE SOUND of laughter carried from the garden into the house through the wide, open doorway. Outside the morning was bright and warm; inside, where Li Yuan sat with his eight-year-old nephew Tsu Tao Chu, it was cooler and in shadow.

They were playing wei chi, practicing openings and corner plays, but Li Yuan seemed distracted. He kept looking out into the garden where the maids were playing ball.

The younger boy's high, singsong voice broke the silence that had lain between them for some time. "Your heart's not in this, is it, Yuan? It's a lovely morning. Why don't we go riding instead?"

Li Yuan turned and looked at him. "I'm sorry, Tao Chu. What did you say?"

"I said . . ." He laughed sweetly, then leaned forward conspir-atorially. "Tell me, Yuan. Which one is it?"

Li Yuan blushed and set a white stone down. "I don't know what you mean, Tao Chu."

Tao Chu raised his eyebrows, then placed a black stone on the board, removing the six white captives he had surrounded.

"I thought Fei Yen was your sweetheart, Yuan. It's clear, though, that some other maiden has won your heart. Or if not your heart—"

"Tao Chu!" Li Yuan looked down at the board and saw the position was lost, his forces disrupted. He laughed. "Is it so obvious?"

Tao Chu busied himself removing the stones and returning them to the bowls, then set the situation up anew. He looked up. "Again?"

Li Yuan shook his head. Then he stood up and went over to the open doorway. The maids were out beyond the ornamental pool, playing catch with a ball of stitched silk. He watched them for a while, his eyes going time and again to Pearl Heart. At first he didn't think she'd seen him, but then he saw her pick up the ball and turn, looking directly at him; her smile holding a special meaning, for him alone.

He lifted his head slightly, smiling back at her, and saw her pause, then throw the ball to one of the other maids, saying something which he couldn't catch. Then he saw her go, between the magnolia and out down the pathway, heading toward his room.

He caught up with her in the corridor outside his room, and turned her, pulling her against him.

"Not here," she said, laughing. "Inside, Li Yuan. Let's get inside first."

He could barely wait for her. As she undressed he ran his hands across her skin, and pressed his face against her hair, which smelled of ginger and cinnamon. He would have taken her then, while he was still fully clothed, but she stopped him and began to undress him, her hands lingering against his painfully stiff penis. In daylight her body seemed different; harder, firmer, less melting than it had seemed in the darkness, but no less desirable. He let her draw him down onto the bed, then he was inside her, spilling his seed at once.

She laughed tenderly, no trace of mockery in her laughter. "I see I'll have to teach you tricks, Li Yuan. Ways of holding back."

"What do you mean?" He lay there against her, his eyes closed, letting her caress his neck, his shoulders, the top of his back.

"There are books we can get, Chun hua. And devices."

He shivered. The light touch of her fingers on his flesh was delicious, making him want to purr like a cat. "Chun hua?" He had not heard of such things. "Spring pictures? What kind of spring pictures?"

She laughed again, then whispered in his ear. "Pictures of men and women doing things to each other. All kind of things. You'd not believe the number of ways it can be done, Li Yuan. And not just with two."

She saw his interest and laughed. "Ah, yes, 1 thought as much. There's no man living who has not desired two girls in bed with him."

He swallowed. "What do you mean, Pearl Heart?" But he was answered almost at once. From behind a screen on the far side of the room came the unmistakable sound of suppressed laughter.

Li Yuan sat up and looked across. "Who's there? I demand to know—"

He fell silent. It was Sweet Rose, the youngest of his maids.

She stepped out from behind the screen, demure but naked, a faint blush on her cheeks and at her neck. "May I join you on the bed, Li Yuan?"

Li Yuan shuddered, then turned and looked mutely at Pearl Heart. She was smiling broadly at him. "That's what we're here for. Didn't you realize it, Li Yuan? For this time. For when you woke to your manhood."

Pearl Heart leaned forward and summoned the younger girl, then drew Li Yuan back onto the bed, making Sweet Rose lie the other side of him. Then, with a shared, sisterly exchange of laughter, they began their work, stroking and kissing him, their skin like silk, their breath like almonds, inflaming his senses until he blossomed and caught fire again.

NAN HO stood there outside the room, his head bowed, his manner apologetic but firm. "I am sorry, Lady Fei, but you cannot go inside."

She looked at him, astonished. It was the second time he had defied her. "What do you mean, cannot? I think you forget yourself, Nan Ho. If I wish to see Li Yuan, I have every right to call on him. I want to ask him if he will ride with me this afternoon, that's all. Now, please, stand out of my way."

He saw it was hopeless to try to deny her any further and stood to one side, his head lowered. "I beg you, Lady Fei—" But she brushed past him and opened the door to Li Yuan's rooms.

"Ridiculous man . . ." she had started to say, then fell silent, sniffing the air. Then she noticed the sounds, coming from beyond the screen. Unusual sounds to be coming from the bedroom of a thirteen-year-old boy. She crept up to the screen, then put her hand to her mouth to stifle her surprise.

It was Li Yuan! Gods! Li Yuan with two of his maids!

For a moment she stood there, mesmerized by the sight of his firm, almost perfect bottom jutting and rutting with one of the maids while the other caressed and stroked the two of them. Then she saw him stiffen and groan and saw the maid's legs tighten momentarily about his back, drawing him down into her.

She shuddered and began to back away, then put her hand to her mouth to stop the laughter that had come unbidden to her lips. Li Yuan! Of all the cold fishes in the sea of life, imagine Li Yuan, rutting with his maids! The dirty little beggar!

Outside she looked at Nan Ho sternly. "I was not here, Nan Ho. Do you understand me?"

The servant bowed deeply. "I understand you, Lady Fei. And I will leave your message for the young prince. I am sure he would welcome the chance to ride with you this afternoon."

She nodded, then turned, conscious of the blush that had come to her cheeks and neck, and walked quickly away.

Li Yuan! She gave a brief laugh, then stopped dead, reman-bering the sight of those small, perfectly formed buttocks clenching at the moment of his orgasm.

"And I thought you so cold, so passionless. So above all this."

She laughed again; a strange, querulous laugh, then walked on, surprised by what she was thinking.

"Do you remember this place, Karr?"

Karr smiled and looked out from their private box into the pit with its surrounding tiers.

"How could I forget it, General?"

Tblonen leaned back and sighed. "Men forget many things they'd do best to remember. Roots. They forget their roots. And when that happens they lose their ability to judge things true and clear."

Karr smiled. "This business—" he pointed to the brilliantly lit combat circle— "it had a way of clearing the mind of everything but truth."

Tblonen laughed. "Yes, I can see that."

Karr turned and faced him. "I'm glad you're back, General. I mean no disrespect to General Nocenzi, but things haven't been the same without you at the helm."

The old man sniffed and tilted his head slightly. "IVe missed it, too, Karr. Missed it badly. But listen, I'm not at the helm. Not in the sense that you're probably thinking. No. This is something else. Something secret that the T'ang has asked me to organize."

He spelled it out quickly, simply, letting Karr understand that he would be briefed more fully later.

"This is a contingency plan, you understand. We hope never to have to use it. If the House votes in favor of the veto on space exploration—as it should—we can put this little scheme to the flame—throw it on the fire, so to speak."

"But you don't believe that, do you, General?"

Tblonen shook his head. "I'm afraid not. I think the T'ang hopes against hope. The House is no friend to the Seven at present."

Below them, in the pit, the two contestants came out and took their places. The fight marshal read out the rules and then stepped back. The pit went deathly silent.

The fight was brief but brutal. In less than a minute one of the two men was dead. The crowd went mad, roaring its approval. Karr watched the stewards carry the body away, then shivered.

"I'm glad I let you buy my contract out. That could have been me."

"No," Tolonen said. "You were the exception. No one would have carried you from the circle. Not in a hundred fights. I knew that at once."

"The first time you saw me?" Karr laughed and turned to face the older man.

"Almost."

Karr was smiling. "I remember even now how you looked at me that first time—so dismissive, it was, that look—and then you turned your back on me."

Tolonen laughed, remembering. "Well, sometimes it's best not to let a man know all you're thinking. But it was true. It was why I welcomed your offer. I knew at once I could use you. The way you stood up to young Hans. I liked that. It put him on his mettle."

Karr looked down. "Have you heard that I've traced DeVore?"

Tolonen's eyes widened. "No! W-here?"

"I'm not certain, but I think he's taken an overseer's job on one of the big plantations. My man Chen is investigating him right now. As soon as he has proof we're going in."

Tolonen shook his head. "Not possible, I'm afraid."

"I'm sorry, General, but what do you mean?"

Tblonen leaned forward and held the top of one of Karr's huge arms. "I need you at once, that's why. I want you training for this operation from this evening. So that we can put the scheme into operation at a moment's notice."

"Is there no one else?"

Tblonen shook his head. "No. There is only one man in the whole of Chung Kuo who could carry out this scheme, and that's you, Karr. Chen will be all right. I'll see he has full backup. But I can't spare you. Not this time."

Karr considered a moment, then looked up again, smiling. "Then I'd best get busy, eh, General?"

OVERSEER BERGSON looked up as Chen entered. The room was dark but for a tight circle of light surrounding where he sat at a table in the center. He was bareheaded, his dark hair slicked back wetly, and he was wearing a simple silk pau, but Chen thought he recognized him at once. It was DeVore. He was almost certain it was. On the low table in front of him a wei chi board had been set up, seven rounded black stones placed on the handicap points, forming the outline of a huge letter H in the center of the grid. On either side of the board was a tray, one filled with white stones, the other with black. "Do you play, Tong Chou?"

Chen met DeVote's eyes, wondering for a moment if it was possible he, too, would see through the disguise, then dismissed the thought, remembering how DeVore had killed the man he, Chen, had hired to play himself that day five years ago when Kao Jyan had died. No, he thought, to you I am long Chou, the new worker. A bright man. Obedient. Quick to learn. But nothing more.

"My father played, Shih Bergson. I learned a little from him."

DeVore looked past Chen at the two henchmen and made a small gesture of dismissal with his chin. They went at once.

"Sit down, Tong Chou. Facing me. We'll talk as we play."

Chen moved into the circle of light and sat. DeVore watched him a moment, relaxed, his hands resting lightly on his knees,

then smiled.

"Those two whoVe just gone. They're useful men, but when it comes to this game they've shit in their heads instead of brains. Have you got shit in your head, Tong Chou? Are you a useful man?"

"I'm useful, Shih Bergson."

DeVore stared back at him a moment, then looked down.

"We'll see."

He took a white stone from the tray and set it down, two lines in, six down at the top left-hand corner of the board from where Chen sat—in shang, the south. Chen noticed how firmly yet delicately DeVore had held the stone between thumb and forefinger; how sharp the click of stone against wood had been as he placed it; how crisp and definite that movement had seemed. He studied the board awhile, conscious of his seven black stones, like fortresses marking out territory on the uncluttered battleground of the board. His seven and DeVore's one. That one so white it seemed to eclipse the dull power of his own.

Chen took a black stone from the tray and held it in his hand a moment, turning it between his fingers, experiencing the smooth coolness of it, the perfect roundness of its edges, the satisfying oblate feel of it. He shivered. He had never felt anything like it before; had never played with stones and board. It had always been machines. Machines, like the one in Kao Jyan's room.

He set the stone down smartly, taking his lead from DeVore, hearing once more that sharp, satisfying click of stone against wood. Then he sat back.

DeVore answered his move at once. Another white stone in the top left corner. An aggressive, attacking move. Unexpected. Pushing directly for the corner. Chen countered almost instinctively, his black stone placed between the two whites, cutting them. But at once DeVore clicked down another stone, forming a tiger's mouth about Chen's last black stone, surrounding it on three sides and threatening to take it unless . . .

Chen connected, forming an elbow of three black stones—a weak formation, though not disastrous, but already he was losing the initiative; letting DeVore's aggressive play force him back on the defensive. Already he had lost the comer. Six plays in and he had lost the first comer.

"Would you like ch'a, Tong Chou?"

He looked up from the board and met DeVore's eyes. Nothing. No trace of what he was thinking. Chen bowed. "I would be honored, Shih Bergson."

DeVore clapped his hands and, when a face appeared around the door, simply raised his right hand, two fingers extended. At the same time his left hand placed another stone. Two down, two in, strengthening his line and securing the corner. Only a fool would lose it now, and DeVore was no fool.

DeVore leaned back, watching him again. "How often did you play your father, Tong Chou?"

"Often enough when I was a child, Shih Bergson. But then he went away. When I was eight. I only saw him again last year. After his funeral."

Chen placed another stone, then looked back at DeVore. Nothing. No response at all. And yet DeVore, like the fictional Tong Chou, had "lost" his father as an eight-year-old.

"Unfortunate. And you've not played since?"

Chen took a breath, then studied DeVore's answer. He played so swiftly, almost as if he weren't thinking, just reacting. But Cheng knew better than to believe that. Every move DeVore made was carefully considered; all the possibilities worked out in advance. To play him one had to be as well prepared as he. And to beat him . . . ?

Chen smiled and placed another stone. "Occasionally. But mainly with machines. It's been some years since I've sat and played a game like this, Shih Bergson. I am honored that you find me worthy."

He studied the board again. The corner lost, almost certainly now, but his own position was much stronger and there was a good possibility of making territory on the top edge, in shang and dm, the west. Not only that, but DeVore's next move was forced. He had to play on the top edge, two in. To protect his line. He watched, then smiled inwardly as DeVore set down the next white stone exactly where he had known he would.

Behind him he heard the door open quietly. "There," said DeVore, indicating a space beside the play table. At once a second, smaller table was set down and covered with a thin cloth. A moment later a serving girl brought the kettle and two bowls, then knelt there, to Chen's right, wiping out the bowls.

"Wei chi is a fascinating game, don't you think, Tong Chou? Its rules are simple—there are only seven things to know—and yet mastery of the game is the work of a lifetime." Unexpectedly he laughed. "Tell me, Tong Chou, do you know the history of the game?"

Chen shook his head. Someone had once told him it had been developed at the same time as the computers, five hundred years ago, but the man who had told him that had been a know-nothing; a shit-brains, as DeVore would have called him. He had a sense that the game was much younger. A recent thing.

DeVore smiled. "How old do you think the game is, Tong Chou? A hundred years? Five hundred?"

Again Chen shook his head. "A hundred, Shih Bergson? Two hundred, possibly?"

DeVore laughed and then watched as the girl poured the ch'a and offered him the first bowl. He lowered his head politely, refusing, and she turned, offering the bowl to Chen. Chen also lowered his head slightly, refusing, and the girl turned back to DeVore. This time DeVore took the bowl in two hands and held it to his mouth to sip, clearly pleased by Chen's manners.

"Would it surprise you, Tong Chou, if I told you that the game we're playing is more than four and a half thousand years old? That it was invented by the Emperor Yao in approximately 2350 B.C.?"

Chen hesitated, then laughed as if surprised, realizing that DeVore must be mocking him. Chung Kuo was not that old, surely? He took the bowl the girl was now offering him and, with a bow to DeVore, sipped noisily.

DeVore drained his bowl and set it down on the tray the girl was holding, waiting for the girl to fill it again before continuing.

"The story is that the Emperor Yao invented wei chi to train the mind of his son, Tan-Chu, and teach him to think like an emperor. The board, you see, is a map of Chung Kuo itself, of the ancient Middle Kingdom of the Han, bounded to the east by the ocean, to the north and west by deserts and great mountain ranges, and to the south by jungles and the sea. The board,

then, is the land. The pieces men, or groups of men. At first the board, like the land, is clear, unsettled, but then as the men arrive and begin to grow in numbers, the board fills. Slowly but inexorably these groups spread out across the land, occupying territory. But there is only so much territory—only so many points on the board to be filled. Conflict is inevitable. Where the groups meet there is war: a war which the strongest and cleverest must win. And so it goes on, until the board is filled and the last conflict resolved."

"And when the board is filled and the pieces still come?"

DeVore looked at him a moment, then looked away. "As I said, it's an ancient game, Tong Chou. If the analogy no longer holds it is because we have changed the rules. It would be different if we were to limit the number of pieces allowed instead of piling them on until the board breaks from the weight of stones. Better yet if the board were bigger than it is, eh?"

Chen was silent, watching DeVore drain his bowl a second time. I'm certain now, he thought. It's you. I know it's you. But Karr wants to be sure. More than that, he wants you alive. So that he can bring you before the T'ang and watch you kneel and beg for mercy.

DeVore set his bowl down on the tray again, but this time he let his hand rest momentarily over the top of it, indicating he was finished. Then he looked at Chen.

"You know, Tong Chou, sometimes I think these two—ch'a and wei chi—along with silk, are the high points of Han culture." Again he laughed, but this time it was a cold, mocking laughter. "Just think of it, Tong Chou! Ch'a and wei chi and silk! All three of them some four and a half thousand years old! And since then? Nothing! Nothing but walls!"

Nothing but walls. Chen finished his ch'a and set it down on the tray the girl held out for him. Then he placed his stone and, for the next half hour, said nothing, concentrating on the game.

At first the game went well for him. He lost few captives and made few trivial errors. The honors seemed remarkably even, and filled with confidence in his own performance, he began to query what Karr had told him about DeVore being a master of weichi. But then things changed. Four times he thought he had DeVore's stones trapped. Trapped with no possibility of escape.

Each time he seemed within two stones of capturing a group; first in ping, the east, at the bottom left-hand corner of the board, then in tsu, the north. But each time he was forced to watch, open mouthed, as DeVore changed everything with a single unexpected move. And then he would find himself backtracking furiously; no longer surrounding but surrounded, struggling desperately to save the group which, only a few moves before, had seemed invincible—had seemed a mere two moves from conquest.

Slowly he watched his positions crumble on all sides of the board until, with a small shrug of resignation, he threw the black stone he was holding back into the tray.

"There seems no point."

DeVore looked up at him for the first time in a long while. "Really? You concede, Tong Chou?"

Chen bowed his head.

"Then you'll not mind if I play black from this position?"

Chen laughed, surprised. The position was lost. By forty, maybe fifty pieces. Irredeemably lost. Again he shrugged. "If that's your wish, Shih Bergson."

"And what's your wish, Tong Chou? I understand you want to be field supervisor."

Chen bowed his head. "That's so, Shih Bergson.

"The job pays well. Twice what you earn now, Tong Chou."

Yes, thought Chen; so why does no one else apply? Because it is an unpopular job, being field supervisor under you, that's why. And so you wonder why I want it.

"That's exactly why I want the job, Shih Bergson. I want to get on. To clear my debts in the Above and climb the levels once again."

DeVore sat back, watching him closely a moment, then he leaned forward, took a black stone from the tray, and set it down with a sharp click.

"All right. I'll consider the matter.-But first there's something you can do for me, Tong Chou. Two nights back the storehouse in the western meadows was broken into and three cases of strawberries, packed ready for delivery to one of my clients in First Level, were taken. You'll understand how inconvenienced I was." He sniffed and looked at Chen directly. "There's a thief on the plantation, Tong Chou. I want to find out who it is and deal with him. Do you understand me?"

Chen hesitated a moment, taken by surprise by this unexpected demand. Then, realizing he had no choice if he was to get close enough to DeVore to get Karr his proof, he dropped his head.

"As you say, Shih Bergson. And when IVe dealt with him?" DeVore laughed. "Then we'll play again, Tong Chou, and talk about your future."

WHEN THE PEASANT had gone, DeVore went across to the screens and pulled the curtain back, then switched on the screen that connected him with Berdichev in the House.

"How are things?" he asked as Berdichev's face appeared.

Berdichev laughed excitedly. "It's early yet, but I think weVe done it. Farr's people have come over and the New Legist faction are swaying a little. Barrow calculates that we need only twenty more votes and weVe thrown the Seven's veto out."

DeVore nodded. "That's good. And afterward?"

Berdichev smiled. "You've heard something, then? Well, that's my surprise. Wait and see. That's all I'll say."

DeVore broke contact. He pulled the curtain to and walked over to the board. The peasant hadn't been a bad player, considering. Not really all that stimulating, .yet amusing enough, particularly in the second phase of the game. He would have to give him nine stones next time. He studied the situation a moment. Black had won, by a single stone.

As for Berdichev and his "surprise". . .

DeVore laughed and began to clear the board. As if you could keep such a thing hidden. The albino was the last surprise Soren Berdichev would spring on him. Even so, he admired Soren for having the insight—and the guts—to do what he had done. When the Seven learned of the investigations—and when they saw the end results . . .

He looked across at the curtained bank of screens. Yes, all hell would break loose when the Seven found out what Soren Berdichev had been up to. And what was so delightful was that it was all legal. All perfectly constitutional. There was nothing they could do about it.

But they would do something. He was certain of that. So it was up to him to anticipate it. To find out what they planned and get in first.

And there was no one better at that game than he. No one in the whole of Chung Kuo.

"Why, look, Soren! Look at Lo Yu-Hsiang!" Clarac laughed and spilled wine down his sleeve, but he was oblivious of it, watching the scenes on the big screens overhead.

Berdichev looked where Clarac was pointing and gave a laugh of delight. The camera was in close-up on the Senior Representative's face.

"Gods! He looks as if he's about to have a coronary!"

As the camera panned slowly round the tiers, it could be seen that the look of sheer outrage on Lo Yu-Hsiang's face was mirrored throughout that section of the House. Normally calm patricians bellowed and raged, their eyes bulging with anger.

Douglas came up behind Berdichev and slapped him on the back. "And there's nothing they can do about it! Well done, Soren! Marvelous! I thought I'd never see the day."

There was more jubilant laughter from the men gathered in the gallery room, then Douglas called for order and had the servants bring more glasses so they could drink a toast.

"To Soren Berdichev! And The New Hope!"

Two dozen voices echoed the toast, then drank, their eyes filled with admiration for the man at the center of their circle.

Soren Berdichev inclined his head, then, with a smile, turned back to the viewing window and gazed down on the scene below.

The scenes in the House had been unprecedented. In all the years of its existence nothing like this had happened. Not even the murder of Pietr Lehmann had rocked the House so violently. The defeat of the Seven's veto motion—a motion designed to confine The New Hope to the Solar System—had been unusual enough, but what had followed had been quite astonishing.

Wild celebrations had greeted the result of the vote. The anti-veto faction had won by a majority of one hundred and eighteen. In the calm that had followed, Under Secretary Barrow had gone quietly to the rostrum and begun speaking.

At first most of the members heard very little of Barrow's speech. They were still busy discussing the implications of the vote. But one by one they fell silent as the full importance of what Barrow was saying began to sweep around the tiers.

Barrow was proposing a special motion, to be passed by a two-thirds majority of the House. A motion for the indictment of certain members of the House. He was outlining the details of investigations that had been made by a secretly convened subcommittee of the House—investigations into corruption, unauthorized practices, and the payment of illegal fees.

By the time he paused and looked up from the paper he was reading from, there was complete silence in the House.

Barrow turned, facing a certain section of the tiers, then began to read out a list of names. He was only partway into that long list when the noise from the Han benches drowned his voice.

Every name on his list was a tai—a "pocket" representative, their positions, their "loyalty," bought and paid for by the Seven. This, even more than the House's rejection of the starship veto, was a direct challenge upon the authority of the Seven. It was tantamount to a declaration of the House's independence from their T'ang.

Barrow waited while the Secretary of the House called the tiers to order, then, ignoring the list for a moment, began an impassioned speech about the purity of the House and how it had been compromised by the Seven.

The outcry from the tai benches was swamped by enthusiastic cheers from all sides of the House. The growing power of the tai had been a longstanding bone of contention, even among the Han Representatives, and Barrow's indignation reflected their own feelings. It had been different in the old days: then a tai had been a man to be respected, but these brash young men were no more than empty mouthpieces for the Seven.

When it came to the vote the margin was as narrow as it could possibly be. Three votes settled it. The eighty-six tai named on Barrow's list were to be indicted.

There was uproar. Infuriated tai threw bench pillows down at the speaker, while some would have come down the aisles to lay hands on him, had not other members blocked their way.

Then, at a signal from the Secretary, House Security troops had come into the chamber and had begun to round up the named tai, handcuffing them like common criminals and removing their permit cards.

Berdichev watched the end of this process—saw the last few tai being led away, protesting violently, down into the cells below the House.

He shivered, exulted. This was a day to remember. A day he had long dreamed of. The New Hope was saved and the House strengthened. And later on, after the celebrations, he would begin the next phase of his scheme.

He turned and looked back at the men gathered in the viewing room, knowing instinctively which he could trust and which not, then smiled to himself. It began here, now. A force which all the power of the Seven could not stop. And the Aristotle file would give it a focus, a sense of purpose and direction. When they saw what had been kept from them, there would be no turning back. The file would bring an end to the rule of Seven.

Yes. He laughed and raised his glass to Douglas once again. It had begun. And who knew what kind of world it would be when they had done with it?"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Darkening of the Light

IT w A S two in the morning and outside the Berdichev mansion, in the ornamental gardens, the guests were still celebrating noisily. A line of sedans waited on the far side of the green, beneath the lanterns, their pole-men and guards in attendance nearby, while closer to the house a temporary kitchen had been set up. Servants moved busily between the guests, serving hot bowls of soup or noodles, or offering more wine.

Berdichev stood on the balcony, looking down, studying it all a moment. Then he moved back inside, smiling a greeting at the twelve men gathered there.

>• These were the first of them. The ones he trusted most. He looked across at the servant, waiting at his request in the doorway, and gave the signal. The servant—a "European," like all his staff these days—returned a moment later with a tray on which was a large potbellied bottle and thirteen delicate porcelain bowls. The servant placed the tray on the table, then, with a deep bow, backed away and closed the door after him. They were alone.

Berdichev's smile broadened. "You'll drink with me chun t'tul" He held up the bottle—a forty-year-old S/iou Hsing peach brandy—and was greeted with a murmur of warm approval. He poured, then handed out the tiny bowls, conscious that the eyes of the "gentlemen" would from time to time move to the twelve thick folders laid out on the table beside the tray.

520

He raised his bowl. "Kan pei!"

"Kan pei!" they echoed and downed their brandies in one gulp.

"Beautiful!" said Moore with a small shudder. "Where did you get it, Soren? I didn't think there was a bottle of Shou Hsing left in all Chung Kuo that was over twenty years old."

Berdichev smiled. "I have two cases of it,'John. Allow me to send you a bottle." He looked about him, his smile for once unforced, quite natural. "And all of you chun t'zu, of course."

Their delight was unfeigned. Such a brandy must be fifty thousand yuan a bottle at the least! And Berdichev had just given a case of it away!

"You certainly know how to celebrate, Soren!" said Parr, coming closer and holding his arm a moment. Parr was an old friend and business associate, with dealings in North America.

Berdichev nodded. "Maybe. But there's much to celebrate tonight. Much more, in fact, than any of you realize. You see, my good friends, tonight is the beginning of something. The start of a new age."

He saw how their eyes went to the folders again.

"Yes." He went to the table and picked up one of the folders. "It has to do with these. You've noticed, I'm sure. Twelve of you and twelve folders." He looked about the circle of them, studying their faces one last time, making certain before he committed himself.

Yes, these were the men. Important men. Men with important contacts. But friends too—men he could trust. They would start it for him. A thing which, once begun, would prove irresistible. And, he hoped, irreversible.

"YouVe all wondering why I brought you up here, away from the celebrations? You're also wondering what it has to do with the folders. Well, I'll keep you wondering no longer. Refill your glasses from the bottle, then take a seat. What I'm about to tell you may call for a stiff drink."

There was laughter, but it was muted, tense. They knew Soren Berdichev well enough to know that he never played jokes, or,made statements he could not support.

When they were settled around the table, Berdichev distributed the folders.

"Before you open them, let me ask each of you something." He turned and looked at Moore. "You first, John. Which is more important to you: a little of your time and energy—valuable as that is—or the future of our race, the Europeans?"

Moore laughed. "You know how I feel about that, Soren."

Berdichev nodded. "Okay. Then let me ask you something more specific. If I were to tell you that in that folder in front of you was a document of approximately two hundred thousand words, and that I wanted you to hand-copy it for me, what would you say to that?"

"Unexplained, I'd say you were mad, Soren. Why should I want to hand-copy a document? Why not get some of my people to put it on computer for me?"

"Of course." Berdichev's smile was harder. He seemed suddenly more his normal self. "But if I were to tell you that this is a secret document. And not just any small corporate secret, but the secret, would that make it easier to understand?"

Moore sat back slightly. "What do you mean, the secret? What's in the file, Soren?"

"I'll come to that. First, though, do you trust me? Is there anyone here who doesn't trust me?"

There was a murmuring and a shaking of heads. Parr spoke for them all. "You know there's not one of us who wouldn't commit half of all they owned on your word, Soren."

Berdichev smiled tightly. "Yes. I know. But what about one hundred percent? Is anyone here afraid to commit that much?"

Another of them—a tall, thin-faced man named Ecker— answered this time. A native of City Africa, he had strong trading links with Berdichev's company, SimFic.

"Do you mean a financial commitment, Soren, or are you talking of something more personal?"

Berdichev bowed slightly. "You are all practical men. That's good. I'd not have any other kind of men for friends. But to answer you, in one sense you're correct, Michael. I do mean something far more personal. That said, which of us here can so easily disentangle their personal from their financial selves?"

There was the laughter of agreement at that. It was true. They were moneyed creatures. The market was in their blood.

"Let me say simply that if any of you choose to open the folder you will be committing yourselves one hundred percent. Personally and, by inference, financially." He put out a hand quickly. "Oh, I don't mean that I'll be coming to you for loans or anything like that. This won't affect your trading positions."

Parr laughed. "I've known you more than twenty years now, Soren, and I realize that—like all of us here—you have secrets you would share with few others. But this kind of public indirectness is most unlike you. Why can't you just tell us what's in the folder?"

Berdichev nodded tersely. "All right. I'll come to it, I promise you, Charles. But this is necessary." He looked slowly about the table, then bowed his head slightly. "I want to be fair to you all. To make certain you understand the risks you would be taking simply in opening the folder. Because I want none of you to feel you were pushed into this. That would serve no one here. In fact, I would much rather that anyone who feels uncomfortable with this leave now before he commits himself that far. And no blame attached. Because once you take the first step—once you find out what's inside the folder—your lives will be forfeit."

Parr leaned forward and tapped the folder. "I still don't understand, Soren. What's in here? A scheme to assassinate the Seven? What could be so dangerous that simply to know of it could make a man's life forfeit?"

"The secret. As I said before. The thing the Han have kept from us all these years. As for why it's dangerous simply to know, let me tell you about a little-known statute that's rarely used these days—and a ministry whose sole purpose is to create an illusion which even they have come to believe is how things really are."

Parr laughed and spread his hands. "Now you are being enigmatic, Soren. What .statute? What ministry? What illusion?"

"It is called simply The Ministry, it is situated in Pei Ching, and its only purpose is to guard the secret. Further, it is empowered to arrest and execute anypne knowing of or disseminating information about the secret. As for the illusion . . ." He laughed sourly. "Well, you'll understand if you choose to open the folder."

One of the men who hadn't spoken before now sat forward. He was a big, powerful-looking man with a long, unfashionable beard. His name was Ross and he was die owner of a large satellite communications company in East Asia.

"This is treason, then, Soren?"

Berdichev nodded.

Ross stroked his beard thoughtfully and looked about him. Then, almost casually, he opened his folder, took out the stack of papers, and began to examine the first page.

A moment later others followed.

Berdichev looked about the table. Twelve folders lay empty, the files removed. He shivered, then looked down, a feint smile on his lips.

There was a low whistle from Moore. He looked up at Berdichev, his eyes wide. "Is this true, Soren? Is this really true?"

Berdichev nodded.

"But this is just so—so fantastic. Like a dream someone's had. It's..." he shrugged.

"It's true," Berdichev said firmly. They were all watching him now. "Which of us here has not been down into the Clay and seen the ruins? When the tyrant Tsao Ch'un built his City, he buried more than the architecture of the past, he buried its history too."

"And built another?" The voice was Parr's.

"Yes. Carefully, painstakingly, over the years. You see, his intention wasn't simply to eradicate all opposition to his rule, he wanted to destroy all knowledge of what had gone before him. As the City grew, so his officials collected all books, all tapes, all recordings, allowing nothing that was not Han to enter their great City. Most of what they collected was simply burned. But not all of it. Much was adapted. You see, Tsao Ch'un's advisors were too clever to simply create a gap. That, they knew, would have attracted curiosity. What they did was far more subtle and, in the long run, far more persuasive to the great mass of people. They set about reconstructing the history of the world—placing Chung Kuo at the center of everything; back in its rightful place, as they saw it."

He drew a breath, then continued, conscious momentarily of noises from the party in the gardens outside. "It was a lie, but a lie to which everyone subscribed, for in the first decades of the City simply to question their version of the past—even to suggest it might have happened otherwise—was punishable by death. But the lie was complex and powerful, and people soon forgot. New generations arose who knew little of the real past. To them the whispers and rumors seemed mere fantasy in the face of the reality they had been taught and could see about them. The media fed them the illusion daily until the illusion became, even for those responsible for its creation, quite real."

"And this—this Aristotle file ... is this the truth Tsao Ch'un suppressed?"

Berdichev looked back at Ross. "Yes."

"How did you come upon it?"

Berdichev smiled. "Slowly. Piece by piece. For the last fifteen years IVe been searching—making my own discreet investigations. Following up clues. And this—this file—is the end result of all that searching."

Ross sat back. "I'm impressed. More than that, Soren, I'm astonished! Truly, for the first time in my life I'm astonished. This is"—he laughed strangely—"well, it's hard to take it in. Perhaps it's the brandy but—"

There was laughter at that, but all eyes were on Ross as he tried to articulate their feelings.

"Well ... I know what my friend John Moore means. It is fantastic. Perhaps too much so to swallow at a single go like this." He reached forward and lifted the first few pages, then looked at Berdichev again. "It's just that I find it all rather hard to believe."

Berdichev leaned forward, light glinting from the lenses of his glasses. "That's just what they intended, Alexander. And it's one of the reasons why I want you all to hand write a copy. That way it will get rooted in you all. You will have done more than simply read it. You will have transcribed it. And in doing so the reality of it will strike you forcibly. You will see how it all connects. Its plausibility—no, its truth!—will be written in the blood of every one of you."

Ross smiled. "I see that the original of this was written in your own hand, Soren. You ask us to commit ourselves equally?"

Berdichev nodded.

"Then I for one am glad to do so. But what of the copy we make? What should we do with it? Keep it safe?"

Berdichev smiled, meeting his friend's eyes. Ross knew. He had seen it already. "You will pass your copy on. To a man you trust like a brother. As I trust you. He, in his turn, will make another copy and pass it on to one he trusts. And so on, forging a chain, until there are many who know. And then . . ." He sat back. "Well, then you will see what will happen. But this—this here tonight—is the beginning of it. We are the first. From here the seed goes out. But harvesttime will come, I promise you all. Harvesttime will come."

"Hung Moo or Han, what does it matter? They're Above. They despise us Clayborn."

The three boys were sitting on the edge of the pool, their feet swung out over the water.

Kim was looking down into the mirror of the water, his eyes tracing the patterns of the stars reflected from the Tun Huang map overhead. He had been silent for some while, listening to the others speak, but now he interrupted them.

"I know what you mean, Anton, but it's not always like that. There are some . . ."

"Like Chan Shui?"

Kim nodded. He had told them what had happened in the Casting Shop. "Yes, like Chan Shui."

Anton laughed. "You probably amuse him. Either that or he thinks that he can benefit somehow by looking after you. As for liking you . . ." '

Kim shook his head. "No. It's not like that. Chan Shui—"

Josef cut in. "Be honest, Kim. They hate us. I mean, what has this Chan Shui done that's really cost him anything? He's stood up to a bully. Fine. And that's impressed you. That and all that claptrap T'ai Cho has fed you about Han justice. But it's all a sham. All of it. It's like Anton says. He's figured you must be important—something special—and he's reckoned that if he looks after you there might be something in it for him."

Again Kim shook his head. "You don't understand. You really don't."

Anton laughed dismissively. "We understand, Kim. But it seems like you're going to have to leam it the hard way. They don't want us, Kim. Not for ourselves, anyway—only for what we are. They use us like machines, and if we malfunction they throw us away. That's the truth of the matter."

Kim shrugged. There was a kind of truth to that, but it wasn't the whole truth. He thought of Matyas and Janko. What distinguished them? They were both bullies. It had not mattered to Matyas that he, Kim, was Clay like himself. No. Nor was it anything Kim had done to him. It was simply that he was different. So it was with Janko. But to some that difference did not matter. T'ai Cho for instance, and Chan Shui. And there would be others, he was sure of it.

"It's them and us," said Anton, laughing bitterly. "That's how it is, Kim. That's how it'll always be."

"No!" Kim was insistent now. "You're wrong. You're both wrong. Them and us. It just isn't like that. Sometimes, yes, but not always."

Anton shook his head. "Always. Deep down it's always there. You should ask him, this Chan Shui. Ask him if he'd let you marry his sister."

"He hasn't got a sister."

"You miss my point, Kim."

Kim shivered and looked away, unconsciously stroking the bruise on his neck. Shame and guilt. It was always there in them, just beneath the skin. But why did they let these things shape them? Why couldn't they break the mold and make new creatures of themselves?

"Maybe I miss your point, but I'd rather think well of Chan Shui than succumb to the bleakness of your view." His voice was colder, more hostile, than he had intended, and he regretted his words at once—true as they were.

Anton stood up slowly, then looked down coldly at his fellow. "Come on, Josef. I don't think we're wanted here anymore."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"

But it was too late. They were gone.

Kim sat there a while longer, distressed by what had happened. But maybe it was unavoidable. Maybe he could only have delayed the moment. Because he was different—even from his own kind.

He laughed. There! He had betrayed himself: had caught himself in his own twisted logic. For either they were all of one single kind—Han, Hung Mao, and Clay—or he was wrong.' And he could not be wrong. His soul cried out not to be wrong.

He looked up at the dull gold ceiling, stretching and easing his neck, then shivered violently. But what if he was wrong? What if Anton was right?

"No." He was determined. "They'll not make me think like that. Not now. Not ever." He looked down at his clenched fists and slowly let the anger drain from him. Then he stood and began to make his way back. Another morning in the Casting Shop lay ahead of him.

THE MACHINE flexed its eight limbs, then seemed to squat and hatch a chair from nothingness.

Kim laughed. "It seems like it's really alive sometimes." Chan Shui, balanced on his haunches at Kim's side, turned his head to look at him, joining in with his laughter. "I know what you mean, Kim. It's that final little movement, isn't it?"

"An arachnoid. That's what it is, Shui!" Kim nodded to himself, studying the now inert machine. Then he turned and saw the puzzlement in the older boy's face.

"It's just a name I thought of for them. Spiders—they're arachnids. And machines that mimic life—those are often called androids. Put the two together and . . ."

Chan Shui's face lit up. It was a rounded, pleasant face, A handsome, uncomplicated face, framed by neat black hair.

Kim looked at him a moment, wondering, then, keeping his voice low, asked the question he had been keeping back all morning. "Do you like me, Chan Shui?"

There was no change in Chan Shui's face. It smiled back at him, perfectly open, the dark eyes clear. "What an absurd question, Kim. What do you think?"

Kim bowed his head, embarrassed, but before he could say anything more, Chan Shui had changed the subject.

"Do you know what they call a spider in Han, Kim?"

Kim met his eyes again. "Chih chu, isn't it?"

Chan Shui seemed pleased. "That's right. But did you know that we have other, more flowery names for them. You see, for us they have always been creatures of good omen. When a spider lowers itself from its web they say, 'Good luck descends from heaven.'"

Kim laughed, delighted. "Are there many spiders where you are, Chan Shui?"

Chan shook his head, then stood up and began examining the control panel. "There are no spiders. Not nowadays. Only caged birds and fish in artificial ponds." He looked back at Kim, a rueful smile returning to his lips. "Oh, and us."

His bitterness had been momentary, yet it was telling. No spiders? How was that? Then Kim understood. Of course. There would be no insects of any kind within the City proper—the quarantine gates of the Net would see to that.

Chan Shui pulled the tiny vial from its slot in the panel and shook it. "Looks like weVe out of ice. I'll get some more."

Kim touched his arm. "I'll get it, Chan Shui. Where do I go?"

The Han hesitated, then smiled. "Okay. It's over there, on the far side. There's a refill tank—see it?—yes, that's it. All you have to do is take this empty vial back, slip it into the hole in the panel at the bottom of the tank, and punch in the machine number. This here." Chan Shui pointed out the serial number on the arachnoid's panel. "It'll return the vial after about a minute, full. Okay?"

Kim nodded and set off, threading his way between the machines. Returning, he took another, different path through the machines, imagining himself a spider moving swiftly along the spokes of his web. He was halfway back when he realized he had made a mistake. Chan Shui lay directly ahead of him, but between them stood Janko, beside his machine, a cruel smile on his face "Going somewhere, rat's ass?" He stepped out, blocking Kim's way.

Kim slipped the vial into the top pocket of his scholar's robe, then looked about him. One of the big collection trays had moved along the main gangway and now barred his way back, while to the left and right of him stacks of freshly manufactured furniture filled the side gangways.

He looked back at Janko, unafraid, concerned only not to break the vial. If he did there would be a fine of a day's wages for both him and Chan Shui. For himself he didn't mind. But for Chan Shui...

"What do you want, Janko?"

Janko turned, facing Chan Shui's challenge. "It's none of your business, Han! Stay out of this!"

Chan Shui just laughed. "None of my business, eh? Is that so, you great bag of putrid rice? Why should you think that?"

Surprisingly Janko ignored the insult. He turned his back on Chan Shui, then faced Kim again. His voice barked out. "Come here, you little rat's ass. Come here and kneel!"

Kim bent his knees slightly, tensing, preparing to run if necessary, but there was no need. Chan Shui had moved forward quickly, silently, and had jumped up onto Janko's back, sending him sprawling forward.

Kim moved back sharply.

Janko bellowed and made to get up, but Chan Shui pulled his arm up tightly behind his back and began to press down on it, threatening to break it.

"Now, just leave him alone, Janko. Because next time I will break your arm. And we'll blame it on one of the machines."

He gave one last, pain-inducing little push against the arm, then let Janko go, getting up off him.

Janko sat up, red faced, muttering under his breath.

Chan Shui held out his arm. "Come on, Kim. He won't touch you, I promise."

But even as Kim made to pass Janko, Janko lashed out, trying to trip him, then scrambled to his feet quickly, facing Chan Shui.

"Try it to my face, chink."

Chan Shui laughed. "Your verbal inventiveness astonishes me, Janko. Where did you learn your English, in the singsong house where your mother worked?"

Janko roared angrily and rushed at Chan Shui. But the young Han had stepped aside, and when Janko turned awkwardly, flailing out with one arm, Chan Shui caught the arm and twisted, using Janko's weight to lift and throw him against the machine.

Janko banged against the control panel, winding himself, then turned his head, frightened, as the machine reared up over him.

The watching boys laughed, then fell silent. But Janko had heard the laughter. He looked down, wiping his bloodied mouth, then swore under his breath.

At that moment the door at the far end of the Casting Shop slid open and Supervisor Nung came out. As he came down the gangway he seemed distracted, his eyes unfocused. Coming closer he paused, smiling at Kim as if remembering something. "Is everything okay, Chan Shui?" he asked, seeming not to see Janko laid there against the machine.

Chan Shui bowed his head, suppressing a smile. "Everything is fine, Supervisor Nung."

"Good." Nung moved on.

Back at their machine Kim questioned him about the incident. "Is Nung okay? He seemed odd."

Chan Shui laughed briefly, then shook his head. "Now, there's a man who'll be his own ruin." He looked at Kim. "Supervisor Nung has a habit. Do you understand me, Kim?"

Kim shook his head.

"He takes drugs. Harmless, mainly, but I think he's getting deeper. These last few weeks . . . Anyway, hand me that vial."

Kim passed him the vial, then looked across, letting his eyes rest briefly on Janko's back.

"By the way, thanks for what you did, Shui. I appreciate it. But really, it wasn't necessary. I'm quick. Quicker than you think. He'd never have caught me."

Chan Shui smiled, then looked up at him again, more thoughtful than before. "Maybe. But I'd rather be certain. Janko's a bit of a head case. He doesn't know quite when to stop. I'd rather he didn't get near you, Kim. Okay?"

Kim smiled and looked down. He felt a warmth like fire in his chest. "Okay."

"Is everything all right?"

Kim looked up from his desk console and nodded. "I'm a little tired, that's all, T'ai Cho."

"Is the work too much for you, then?"

Kim smiled. "No, T'ai Cho. I've had a few restless nights, that's all."

"Ah." That was unusual. T'ai Cho studied the boy a moment. He was a handsome boy now that the feral emaciation of the Clay had gone from his face. A good diet had worked wonders, but it could not undo the damage of those earliest years. T'ai Cho smiled and looked back down at the screen in front of him. What might Kim have been with a proper diet as an infant? With the right food and proper encouragement? T'ai Cho shuddered to think.

T'ai Cho looked up again. "We'll leave it for now, eh, Kim.⁷ A tired brain is a forgetful brain." He winked. "Even in your case. Go and have a swim. Then get to bed early. We'll take this up again tomorrow."

When Kim had gone, he sat there, thinking about the last week. Kim seemed to have settled remarkably well into the routine of the Casting Shop. Supervisor Nung was pleased with him, and Kim himself was uncomplaining. Yet something worried T'ai Cho. There was something happening in Kim—something deep down that perhaps even Kim himself hadn't recognized as yet. And now this. This sleeplessness. Well, he would watch Kim more closely for the next few days and try to fathom what it was.

He got up and went across to Kim's desk, then activated the memory. At once the screen lit up.

T'ai Cho laughed, surprised. Kim had been doodling. He had drawn a web in the center of the screen. A fine, delicate web from which hung a single thread which dropped off the bottom of the screen.

He scrolled the screen down, then laughed again. "And here's the spider!"

But then he leaned closer and, adjusting the controls, magnified the image until the spider's features filled the screen: the familiar, dark-eyed features of a child.

T'ai Cho frowned, then switched the machine off. He stood there a moment, deep in thought, then nodded to himself. Yes. He would watch him. Watch him very carefully indeed.

KIM FLOATED on his back in the water, his eyes closed. He had been thinking of Chung Kuo, and of the people he had met in the Above. What had any of them in common? Birth, maybe. That and death, and perhaps a mild 'curiosity about the state between. He smiled. Yes, and that was it. That was what astonished him most of all. Their lack of curiosity. He had thought it would be different up here, in the Above. He had believed that simple distance from the Clay would bring enlightenment. But it was not so. There was a difference in them, yes, but that difference was mainly veneer. Scratch away that surface and they proved themselves every bit as dull, every bit as incuriously wedded to their senses, as the most pitiful creature of the Clay.

The smile had faded from his lips. Kim shuddered, then turned his body slowly in the water. The Clay. What was the Clay but a state of mind? An attitude?

That was the trouble with them all. They followed an idea only to a certain stage—pursued its thread only so far into the labyrinth—and then let it fall slack, as if satisfied there was no more to see, no more left to discover. Take the Aristotle file, for instance. They had been happy to see it only as a game he had devised to test his intellect and stretch himself. They had not looked beyond that. That single explanation was enough for them. But had they pushed it further—had they dealt with it, even hypothetically, as real, even for one moment—they would have seen at once where he had got it from. Even now they might wake to it. But he thought not. Their lack of curiosity would keep it from them.

It was strange, in a way, because they had explained it to him in the first place; had told him how intricately connected the finances and thus the computer systems of Chung Kuo were. It was they who had explained about "discrete systems" cut off from all the rest; islands of tight-packed information, walled round with defenses. And it was they who had told him that the Project's system was "discrete."

He had discovered none of that himself. All he had discovered was that the Project's files wese not alone within the walled island of their computer system. There was another file inside the system—an old, long-forgotten file that had been there a century or more, dormant, undisturbed, until Kim had found it. And not just any file. This was a library. No. More than that. It was a world. A world too rich to have been invented, too consistent—even in its errors—to have been anything less than real.

So why had the Seven hidden it? What reason could they have had for burying the past?

Freed from the burden of his secret, he had spent the last two nights considering just this. He had looked at it from every side, trying to see what purpose they had had in mind. And finally he had understood. It was to put an end to change. They had lied to end the Western dream of progress. To bring about a timeless age where nothing changed. A golden age.

But that left him with the problem of himself, for what was he if not Change personified? What if not a bacillus of that selfsame virus they had striven so long and hard to eradicate?

Kim opened his eyes and rolled over onto his front, then kicked out for the deeper water.

He saw it clearly now. What he was made him dangerous to them—made him a threat to the Seven and their ways. Yet he was also valuable. He knew, despite their efforts to hide it from him, what SimFic had paid for his contract. But why had they paid so vast a sum? What did they think to use him for?

Change. He was almost certain of it. But how could he be sure?

Push deeper in, he told himself. Be curious. Is SimFic just a faceless force? A mechanism for making profits? Or does it have a personality?

And if so, whose?

The name came instantly. He had heard it often enough of late in the news. Soren Berdichev.

Yes, but who is he? A businessman. Yes. A Dispersionist. That too. But beyond that, what? What kind of man is he? Where does he come from? What does he want? And—most important of all—what does he want of me?

Kim ducked his head beneath the surface then came up again, shaking the water from his hair, the tiredness washed suddenly from his mind. He felt a familiar excitement in his blood and laughed. Yes, that was it! That would be his new task. To find out all he could about the man.

And when he'd found it out?

He drifted, letting the thread fall slack. Best not anticipate so far. Best find out what he could and then decide.

SOREN BERDICHEV sat in the shadowed silence of his study, the two files laid out on the desk in front of him. The Wu had just gone, though the sweet, sickly scent of his perfume lingered in the air. The message of the yarrow stalks was written on the slip of paper Berdichev had screwed into a ball and thrown to the far side of the room. Yet he could see it clearly even so.

The light has sunk into the earth:

The image of darkening of the light.

Thus does the superior man live with the great mass:

He veils his light, yet still he shines.

He banged the desk angrily. This threw all of his deliberations out. He had decided on his course of action and called upon the Wu merely to confirm what he had planned. But the Wu had contradicted him. And now he must decide again.

He could hear the Wu's scratchy voice even now as the old man looked up from the stalks; could remember how his watery eyes had widened; how his wispy gray beard had stuck out stiffly from his chin.

"K'un, the Earth, in the above, Li, the Fire, down below. It is Ming I, the darkening of the light."

It had meant the boy. He was certain of it. The fire from the earth. He veils Jus light, yet still he shines.

"Is this a warning?" he had asked, surprising the old man, for he had never before interrupted him in all the years he had been casting the I C/iing for him.

"A warning, S/iih Berdichev?" The Wu had laughed. "The Book of Changes does not warn. Yoif mistake its purpose. Yet the hexagram portends harm . . . injury."

Berdichev had nodded and fallen silent. But he had known it for what it was. A warning. The signs were too strong to ignore. So now he must decide again.

He laid his glasses on the desk and picked up the newest of the files containing the genotype reports he had had done.

He spread the two charts on the desk before him, beside each other, then touched the pad, underlighting the desk's surface.

There was no doubt about it. Even without the expert's report on the matter, it could be seen at once. The similarities were striking. He traced the mirrored symbols on the spiraling trees of the two double helices and nodded to himself.

"So you are Edmund Wyatt's son, Kim Ward. I wonder what Edmund would have made of that?"

He laughed sadly, realizing for the first time how much he missed his dead friend's quiet strengths, then sat back, rubbing his eyes.

The genotyping and the Aristotle file, they were each reason enough in themselves to have Kim terminated. The first meant he was the son of the traitor, Wyatt, the second breached the special Edict which concealed Chung Kuo's true past. Both made Kim's life forfeit under the law, and that made the boy a threat to him. And so, despite the cost—despite the huge potential profit to be made from him—he had decided to play safe and terminate the boy, at the same time erasing all trace of those who had prepared the genotype report for him. But then the Wu had come.

The sun in the earth. Yes, it was the boy. There was no doubt about it. And, as he had that first time he had used the services of the Wu, he felt the reading could not be ignored. He had to act on it.

A small shiver ran through him, remembering that first time, almost nine years ago now. He had been skeptical and the Wu had angered him by laughing at his doubt. But only moments later the Wu had shocked him into silence with his reading.

The wind drives over the water:

The image of dispersion.

Thus the kings of old sacrificed to the Lord And built temples.

It had been the evening before his dinner with Edmund Wyatt and Pietr Lehmann—a meeting at which he was to decide whether or not he should join their new Dispersion faction. And there it was. The fifty-ninth hexagram—/iuan. He remembered how he had listened, absorbed by the Wu's explanation, convinced by his talk of high goals and the coming of spring after the hardness of winter. It was too close to what they had been talking of to be simple chance or coincidence. Why, even the title of the ancient book seemed suddenly apt, serendipitous—The Book of Changes. He had laughed and bowed and paid the Wu handsomely before contacting Edmund at once to tell him yes.

And so it had begun, all those years ago. Nor could he ever think of it without seeing in his mind the movement of the wind upon the water, the budding of leaves upon the branches. So how could he argue with it now—now that he had come to this new beginning?

He switched off the underlighting, slipped the charts back into the folder, then picked up his glasses and stood, folding them and placing them in the pocket of his pau.

The sun in the earth. . . . Yes, he would leave the boy for now. But in the morning he would contact his man in the Midlevels and have him bomb the laboratory where they had prepared the genotypes.

SUPERVISOR NUNG sat himself behind his desk and cleared a pile of documents onto the floor before addressing Kim.

"Chan Shui is not here today," he explained, giving Kim the briefest glance. "His father has been ill and the boy is taking some time off to look after him. In the circumstances I have asked Tung Lian to look after you until Chan Shui is back with us."

The office was far more untidy than Kim remembered it. Crates, paper, even clothes, were heaped against one wall, while a pile of boxes had been left in front of the bank of screens.

"Excuse me, Supervisor Nung, but who is Tung Lian?"

Nung looked up again distractedly, then nodded. "He'll be here any moment." Then, realizing his tone had been a little too sharp, he smiled at Kim before looking down again.

A moment later there was a knock and a young Han entered. He was a slightly built, slope-shouldered boy a good two or three years younger than Chan Shui. Seeing Kim he looked down shyly, avoiding his eyes, then moved closer to the desk.

"Ah, Tung Lian. You know what to do."

Tung Lian gave a jerky bow. Then, making a gesture for Kim to follow him, he turned away.

Walking back through the Casting Shop, Kim looked about him, feeling a slight sense of unease, but there was no sign of Janko. Good. Perhaps he would be lucky. But even if Janko did turn up, he'd be all right. He would simply avoid the older boy: use guile and quickness to keep out of his way.

The machine was much the same as the one he had operated with Chan Shui, and seeing that the boy did not wish to talk to him, Kim simply got on with things.

He was sitting in the refectory at the midmorning break when he heard a familiar voice call out to him from the far side of the big room. It was Janko.

He finished his ctia and set the bowl down, then calmly got up from the table.

Janko was standing in the doorway to the Casting Shop, a group of younger boys gathered about him. He was showing them something, but seeing Kim approach, he wrapped it quickly in a cloth.

Kim had glimpsed something small and white in Janko's hand. Now, as Janko faced him, his pocked face split by an ugly smile, he realized what it had been. A tooth. Janko had lost a tooth in his fight with Chan Shui yesterday.

He smiled and saw Janko's face darken.

"What are you smiling at, rat's ass?"

He almost laughed. He had heard the words in his head a moment before Janko had uttered them. Predictable, Kim thought; that's what you are, Janko. Even so, he remembered what Chan Shui had said about not pushing him too far.

"I'm sorry, Janko. I was just so pleased to see you."

That was not the right thing, either, but it had come unbidden, as if in challenge, from his darker self.

Janko sneered. "We'll see how pleased you are. . . ." But as he moved forward, Kim ducked under and round him and was through the doorway before he could turn. "Come back here!" Janko bellowed, but the bell was sounding and the boys were already filing out to get back to their machines.

For the rest of the morning Janko kept up a constant stream of foul-mouthed taunts and insults, his voice carrying above the hum of the machines to where Kim was at work. But Kim blocked it all out, looking inward, setting himself the task of connecting two of the sections of his star-web—something he had never attempted before. The problems were of a new order of difficulty and absorbed him totally, but finally he did it and, delighted, turned, smiling, to find himself facing Janko again.

"Are you taking the piss, rat's ass?"

Kim's smile faded slowly.

"Didn't you hear the bell?" Janko continued, and the group of boys behind him laughed, as if it were the funniest thing anyone had ever said.

Dull-wits, thought Kim, surprised that he had missed the bell. He glanced across at Tung Lian and saw at once how uneasy he was. Strangely, he found himself trying to reassure the young Han. "It's okay," he said. "I'm all right, Tung Lian. Really I am."

Janko echoed back his words, high pitched, in what he must have thought was a good imitation of Kim's voice, and the ghouls behind him brayed once more.

He felt a slight twinge of fear at the pit of his stomach, but nothing that cowed him or made him feel daunted in any way by the boy in front of him.

"I don't want to fight with you, Janko," he said quietly.

"Fight?" Janko laughed, surprised, then leaned toward Kim menacingly. "Who said anything about fighting? I just want to beat the shit out of you, rat's ass!"

Kim looked about him. Boys blocked both his way back and his route to the entrance doorway. He looked up. Yes, he had thought as much. The two overhead cameras were covered over with jackets. He had been set up. They had planned this. Perhaps since they'd heard Chan Shui was absent.

So Janko wasn't alone in hating him. Far from it. Kim shivered. He hadn't realized.

"Please, Janko. .." Tung Lian began feebly, but Janko barked at him to be quiet and he did so at once, moving back out of die way.

So I'm alone, Kim thought. Just as Anton said I'd be. Them and us. Or, in this case, them and me. The humor of it pleased him. Made him laugh.

"What's so funny, rat's ass?"

"You," said Kim, no longer caring what he said. "You big strutting bag of bird shit."

But Janko merely smiled. He moved a pace closer, knowing there was nowhere for Kim to run this time.

But run Kim did, not toward the door or back away from Janko, but directly at Janko—up, onto his chest and over the top of him as he fell backward, his mouth open wide in surprise, then away toward the toilets.

"Stop him!" yelled Janko, clambering to his feet again. "Block the little bastard off!"

Kim ran, dodging past anyone who tried to stop him. He would lock himself in. Hold out until Nung came out to investigate, or T'ai Cho came up to see why he'd not returned.

But they had preempted him. Someone had sealed all the locks to the toilet doors with an ice-based glue. He checked diem all quickly, just in case he had been mistaken, then turned. Janko was standing there, as he knew he would be, watching him.

Kim looked up. Of course. They had covered the camera here too. Very thorough, Kim thought, and knew from its thoroughness that Janko had not been involved in planning this. This was all far too clever for him. Janko was only the front man, the gullible dupe who would carry out the plan. No, he wasn't its architect: he had been manipulated to this point by someone else.

The realization made Kim go cold. There was only one of diem in the whole Casting Shop capable of planning this. And he was not here.. . .

Janko laughed and began to come at him. Kim could feel the hatred emanating from the boy, like something real, something palpable. And this time his hands weren't empty. This time he held a knife in his left hand.

"Tai Cho! T'ai Cho!"

Tai Cho stopped and turned. Director Andersen's secretary was running down the corridor after him.

"What is it, woman?" he said, conscious of his colleagues' stares and annoyed by her lack of decorum. But a moment later, when he had been told what had happened, he took her arm, oblivious of "proper conduct," and hurried her back down the corridor.

"Where is he, for the gods' sake?"

A slight color came to her cheek, and he understood at once, but he hadn't meant Andersen. He pulled her around, facing him.

"The boy, I mean! Where's the boy?"

She was flustered and close to tears. It was the first crisis that had come up in her office and Director Andersen had not been there to deal with it.

"I don't know!" she wailed. "Supervisor Nung's note was only brief. He gave no details other than what IVe told you."

"Gods!" T'ai Cho beat his brow with the palm of his left hand and looked this way and that, then began to hurry her back toward Director Andersen's offices again.

Outside Andersen's door he pulled her around again and spoke to her slowly, making sure she understood what she had to do.

"I know it's embarrassing, but it'll be more embarrassing for the Director if he doesn't get to hear about this fast. Whatever singsong house he's in, get a message to him fast and get him back here. Here! Understand me, woman?"

When she hesitated he barked at her. "Just do it! I'll go and see how the boy is and sort out things that end. But Director Andersen must be contacted. The whole Project's in jeopardy unless you can get him here."

The firmness of his instructions seemed to calm her and she bowed and went inside, to do as she'd been told.

T'ai Cho found Nung slumped over his desk, OD'd. He had been ready to lay hands on him to get at the truth of things but it seemed too late for that now. The message to Andersen must have been the last thing he managed to do in his worthless life.

He shivered and looked about him, then noticed one of the boys hanging about at the far end of the Casting Shop. He ran across to him, grabbing the boy by the arm so that he could not make off.

"Where did they take Kim? You know, the Clayborn boy? Where did they take him?"

He noticed the strange look of revulsion the boy gave him at the mention of Kim, but held on, shaking the boy until he got some sense from him. Then he threw him aside and ran on, toward the elevators.

They had taken him to the local Security post. Of course! Where else? But he was not thinking straight, he was just acting now, following his instincts, trying to get to Kim before they hurt him any more.

The soldier at the desk told him to sit and wait. He lifted up the barrier and went through anyway, ignoring the shout from behind him. Then, when the soldier laid hands on him from behind, he whirled about and shouted at the man.

"Do you realize who I am, soldier?"

The tone of absolute authority in his voice—a tone he had once used to cower unruly boys fresh from the Clay—worked perfectly. The soldier backed off a pace and began to incline his head. T'ai Cho pressed the advantage before the soldier could begin to think again.

"My uncle is the Junior Minister T'ai Feng, responsible for Security subsidies. Lay a finger on me and he'll break you, understand me, soldier?"

This time the soldier bowed fully and brought his hand up to his chest in salute.

"Good! Now lead me through to your commanding officer at once. This is a matter of the utmost urgency both to myself and to my uncle, the Junior Minister."

As the soldier bowed again and moved past him, T'ai Cho realized fleetingly that it was his robes which had helped create the right impression. He was wearing his lecturer's pau with the bright blue patch, in many ways reminiscent of the sort of gown worn by a high official.

The soldier barely had time to announce him—and no time to turn and query his name—before he burst in behind him and took a chair in front of the Security officer.

This officer was less impressed by tones and gowns and talk of uncles. He asked immediately to see T'ai Cho's permit card. T'ai Cho threw it across the desk at him, then leaned across almost threateningly.

"Where's the boy? The boy from the Clay?"

The officer looked up at him, then down at the permit card. Then he threw the card back at T'ai Cho.

"If I were you, Shih T'ai, I'd leave here at once, before you get into any more trouble."

T'ai Cho ignored the card. He glared at the officer. "Where's the boy? I'm not leaving until I've seen the boy!"

The officer began to get up from his chair, but T'ai Cho leaned right across and pulled him down.

"Sit down, for the gods' sake and hear me out!"

Tai Cho shivered. He had never felt such anger or fear or urgency before. They shaped his every action now.

"Where is the boy?" he demanded fiercely.

The officer moved his hand slightly and pressed a pad on the desk, summoning help. He was certain nOw he had another madman on his hands.

"Understand me, Shih T'ai. The boy is in safe hands. We're seeing to the matter. It's a simple case of assault of a citizen by a nonregistered being. We'll be terminating the NRB in about an hour or so, once authorization has come down from above."

"You're doing what?" Pai Cho screamed. He stood up violently, making the officer do the same; his hands out defensively, expecting attack.

"Please, Shih T'ai. Sit down and calm down."

The door slid open quietly behind T'ai Cho, but he heard it even so and moved around the desk, so that his back was against the wall.

"You have no jurisdiction here," the officer said, his voice calmer now that he had assistance. "Whatever your relationship to the boy, I'm afraid the matter is out of your hands."

T'ai Cho answered him at once. "It's you who doesn't understand. Kim Ward is not an NRB, as you so ridiculously put it, but one of the most brilliant and important scientific minds in the whole of Chung Kuo. SimFic have negotiated a contract for his services for ten million yuan."

He had said the last three words slowly and clearly and with maximum emphasis and saw the effect the fantastic sum had on them.

"Ten million?" The officer gave a brief, thoughtful laugh. Then he shook his head. "Oh no. I don't believe you, Shih T'ai. This is just more of your talk of important uncles!"

T'ai Cho shook his head, then spoke again, his voice ringing with firmness and determination. "There's one more thing you don't understand. I don't care what happens to me. But you do. That makes me stronger than you. Oh, you can think me a liar or a madman, but just consider—if you ignore my warning and go ahead without checking up, then you'll be liable directly to SimFic for unauthorized destruction of their property." He laughed, suddenly horrified by this nightmare, sickened that he should even need to do this. Couldn't they see he was only a little boy—a frightened little boy who'd been savagely attacked?

Still the officer hesitated. "There are certain procedures. I—"

T'ai Cho yelled at the man; using language he had never before in his life used. "Fuck your procedures! Get on to Director Andersen at once. Unless you really want to be sued for ten million yuanl"

The officer blanched, then consulted his compatriot a second. Swallowing, he turned back to T'ai Cho. "Would you be willing to wait in a cell for half an hour while we make checks?"

T'ai Cho bowed. "Of course. That's all I want you to do. Here." he took a notepad from the pocket of his robe and, with the stylus from the officer's desk, wrote Andersen's office contact number and his name on the tiny screen. "You'll find they'll switch you through twice, so hold on. It's a discrete service, you see."

The officer hesitated, then gave the smallest bow, half convinced now that T'ai Cho had calmed.

"Andersen?"

"That's right. He might not be there at once, but keep trying. IVe asked his secretary to get him back there as soon as possible. He was . . . on business."

An hour later T'ai Cho and four soldiers were taking Kim back to the Project. Kim was heavily sedated and secured in a special carrying harness. It was hard to see what injuries, if any, he had received in the fight with the other boys. His face seemed unmarked. But he was alive and he was not going to be "terminated," as that bastard in the Security Post had termed it.

Now it was up to Andersen.

Director Andersen met him at the top gate. "I owe you, T'ai Cho," he said, slapping the tutor's back. But T'ai Cho turned on him angrily.

"I didn't do it to save your hide, Andersen. Where were you?"

Andersen swallowed, noting the open disrespect. "I— I—" he blustered, then he bowed. "I'm sorry, T'ai Cho. I know you didn't. Even so, I'm indebted. If there's anything—"

But T'ai Cho simply strode past him, disgusted, thinking of Nung and what had been allowed to happen to Kim. All of it was indirectly Andersen's fault. For not making all the right checks beforehand. And if there was any justice, Berdichev would have his hide for it!

Half an hour later he was back in Andersen's office.

"They're what?"

Andersen looked at the package the messenger had delivered ten minutes earlier and repeated what he had said.

"The boys family are suing us for assault by a property owned by the Project. They've started a suit for fifteen million yuan."

T'ai Cho sat back, aghast. "But the boy attacked Kim!"

Andersen laughed bitterly. "If that's the case, T'ai Cho, why is their boy on the critical list and not Kim? Here, look at these injuries! They're horrific! More than seventeen broken bones and his left ear bitten off. Bitten off! The little savage!"

T'ai Cho glared at him, then looked down at the 2-D shots the family's advocate had sent with his package. Gods! he thought, revolted despite himself. Did Kim do this? And he was afraid Matyas would kill him!

Andersen was muttering to himself now. "Fuck him! Fuck the little bastard! Why did he have to go and attack one of them?" He looked at T'ai Cho. "Why didn't you tell me he was capable of this?"

T'ai Cho went to protest, then thought of all that had been happening the last week or so. Were there warning signs? The restless nights? The problems with Matyas? Should he have foreseen this? Then he rejected all that. He threw the photos down, and with all the angry indignation of the parent of a wronged child, he stood and shouted at Andersen across the table.

"He didn't attack this boy! I know he didn't! They attacked him! They must have! Don't you understand that yet?"

Andersen looked up at him scornfully. "Who gives a shit, eh? We're all out of a job now. There's no way we can contest this. Nung's dead and the cameras were all covered over. There's not a bruise on Kim and the other lad's in critical." He laughed. "Who in their right mind would believe Kim was the victim?"

T'ai Cho was watching the Director closely now. "So what are you going to do?"

Andersen, as ever, had preempted him. He saw it in his face.

"I've taken advice already."

"And?"

Andersen pushed the package aside and leaned across the table. "The Project's advocate suggests there are ways we can contain the damage. You see, there's not just the matter of the Project's liability to the parents of the injured boy but the question of personal responsibility." He looked directly at T'ai Cho. "Yours and mine, in particular. Now, if Kim had actually died in the fight . . ."

T'ai Cho shook his head in disbelief. His voice, when he found it again, came out as a whisper. "What have you done, Andersen? What in the gods' names have you done?"

Andersen looked away. "I've signed the order. He'll be terminated in an hour."

BERDICHEV WENT to the cell to see the boy one last time before they sent him on. Kim lay there, pale, his dark eyes closed, the bulky secure-jacket like an incomplete chrysalis, disguising how frail he really was.

Well, well, Berdichev thought, you have tried your hardest to make my decision an empty one, haven't you? But perhaps it was just this that the Wu had foretold. The darkening of the light.

He knelt and touched the boy's cheek. It was cooler than his own flesh, but still warm. Yes, it was fortunate he had got here in time—before that asshole Andersen had managed to bugger things up for good and all. He had "Pai Cho to thank for that.

And now it was all his. Kim and the Project. And all for the asking price of ten million yuan he had originally contracted purely for the boy.

Berdichev laughed. It had all been rather easy to manage in the circumstances. The board had agreed to the deal at once, and to help facilitate matters he had offered eight of the ten sitting members an increase in their yearly stipend. The other two he had wanted out anyway, and when the vote went against them he had accepted their resignations without argument. As for the matter of the aggrieved parents, their claim was dropped when they received his counterclaim for two hundred million— his estimate of the potential loss of earnings SimFic would suffer if Kim was permanently brain damaged. They had been further sweetened by an out-of-court no-liability-accepted settlement of fifty thousand yuan. More than enough in exchange for their dull-witted son-

But what damage had it done? What would Kirn be like when the wraps came off and the scars had healed? Not the physical scars, for they were miraculously slight, but the deeper scars— the psychological ones?

He shuddered, feeling suddenly closer to Kim than he had ever been. As if the Wu's reading had connected him somehow to the boy. The sun was buried in the earth once more, but would it rise again? Would Kim become again what he had been? Or was he simple, unawakened Clay again?

Ten million yuan. That was how much he had gambled on Kim's full and complete recovery. And the possible return? He laughed. Maybe a thousand times as much! Maybe nothing.

Berdichev got up and wiped his hands on his jacket, then turned to the two SimFic guards, indicating that they should take the boy away. Then, when they had gone, he crossed the cell and looked at its second occupant. This one was also trussed.

He laughed and addressed the corpse of the Director. "You thought you'd fuck with me, eh, Andersen? Well, no one does that and gets away with it. No one. Not even you."

And, still laughing, he turned and left the cell.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ice and Fire

BE PATIENT, Li Yuan, we'll not be much longer now!

Pearl Heart tugged the two wings of his collar together with a show of mock annoyance, then fastened the first of the four tiny catches. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, Pearl Heart kneeling on the floor in front of him, dressing him, while Sweet Rose knelt on the bed behind him, brushing and braiding his hair.

The younger girl laughed softly. "Your hair's so long, Li Yuan. Such good, strong hair. It doesn't split easily." She leaned forward, brushing her nose against it, breathing in its scent. "I wish I had such hair, dear Yuan."

He made to turn and speak to her, but Pearl Heart gently brought his head back around, tutting to herself. The last two catches were always the most tricky to fasten.

Li Yuan laughed softly. "Your hair is lovely, too, Sweet Rose. And never more lovely than when it rests across my lap."

Sweet Rose blushed and looked down, reminded of what they had been up to only hours before. Bearl Heart looked up into his face, amused. "Perhaps you'd like all five of us next time?"

He looked past her, smiling. "Perhaps. . . ."

"Still,"-she continued, frowning with concentration as she tried to fix the last of the catches, "it will be good for you to get some exercise."

Li Yuan laughed, delighted. "You really think so, Pearl Heart? After last night?"

She leaned back away from him with a sigh, the collar fastened at last, then shook her head, her eyes sparkling.

"You young men. You think you're real horsemen simply because you can keep at it all night long, don't you? But there's more to horsemanship than keeping in the saddle!"

Sweet Rose had gone silent, her head bowed. Pearl Heart looked back. Li Yuan was staring at her strangely. She thought back, then ducked her head, blushing, realizing how she had linked the two things. Li Yuan was about to go out riding with Fei Yen, and there she was saying ...

"Forgive me, Prince, I didn't mean ..."

But Li Yuan simply leaned forward and took her head between his hands, kissing her forehead before pressing her face down into his lap and closing his legs about her playfully.

She fought up away, enjoying the game, then stood there a few paces off, admiring him. Sweet Rose had finished and had placed a riding hat upon his tight-coiled hair. He was dressed entirely in green, from hat down to boots: a dozen subtle shades of green, yet each pf them fresh and bright, reminiscent of the first days of spring, when the snow has just thawed.

"You look—" she laughed and clapped her hands—"you look like a prince, Li Yuan!"

He laughed with her, then turned to give Sweet Rose a farewell peck before rushing off.

The two maids watched him go, then began to tidy the room. As Pearl Heart stripped the covers from the cushions, she noticed the square of silk beneath one of them. It was a pale lilac with the pictogram of the Yin family in green in one comer. She knew at once whose it was, and lifted it to her nose briefly before returning it, making no mention to Sweet Rose.

"She's beautiful, don't you think, Pearl Heart?"

Sweet Rose was gazing outward through the open doorway, following the figure of Li Yuan as he made his way through the gardens.

"They say there's no one quite as beautiful in all the Families as Fei Yen. But she's a hua poo, a flowery panther. She's headstrong and willful for all her beauty."

Sweet Rose sighed and looked back at her older sister. "And Li Yuan, he seems to love her like a brother."

Pearl Heart laughed. "Have you seen how his eyes grow soft at the merest glimpse of her. He's hooked, the poor little one."

"Ah. . . ." Sweet Rose glanced around once more, then busied herself, disturbed by what Pearl Heart had said. A moment later, while she was gathering up the linen, she stopped sud-denly and looked up again, her eyes moist. "Then I feel pity for him, Pearl Heart. For nothing can come of it."

Pearl Heart nodded sagely. "It is our law, Sweet Rose. A man cannot marry his brother's wife. And there's wisdom in that law, mei mei, for think what would come of things were it not so. There are men who would murder their own brothers for the sake of a worthless woman!"

Sweet Rose looked down. "And yet we are sisters. And we share a man."

Pearl Heart laughed and began to take the new silk sheets from the drawer. "Li Yuan's a boy, and they're less complex than men. But in any case, the whole thing's totally different. We are here only to help him and teach him. We must think not of ourselves but of the future T'ang."

Sweet Rose studied her sister a moment, noting how she busied herself as if unconcerned. But she had heard the undertone of bitterness in her voice and could see the faint trace of regret at the comers of her mouth and in her eyes and knew that, whatever else she said, she, too, was just a little in love with the young Prince.

"What are you reading?"

Fei Yen half turned her face toward him, then smiled and set the book down on the wooden ledge beside her. "Ah, Li Yuan, I wondered when you'd come."

She was sitting in a bower overlooking one of the garden's tiny waterfalls. The interlaced branches of the maple overhead threw her features into shadow as she looked at him, but he could see that her hair had been put up in a complex bun, the dark, fine bunches held there by tiny ivory combs no bigger than his thumbnail. She was wearing a waist-length, curve-edged riding-

tunic with a high collar, the satin a delicate lavender with the thinnest edging of black, while her riding breeches were of dark blue silk, cut almost to her figure. Her boots were of kid leather, dyed to match the breeches.

He let his query pass. "Shall I come and sit with you, Fei Yen?"

"Wait there, Li Yuan. I'll come out to you. It's rather warm in here. Why don't we walk down to the terrace?"

He bowed, then moved back to let her pass, smelling the scent of her for the first time that day. Mei hua. Plum blossom. He fell in beside her on the path.

"How is your father, Yin Tsu?"

She laughed. "He's fine. As he was yesterday when you asked. And my three brothers, too, before you ask." She stopped and inclined her head toward him. "Let's drop formality, shall we, Li Yuan? I find it all so tiresome after a while."

A small bird flitted from branch to branch overhead, distracting them both a moment. When they looked down again it was at the same time. Their eyes met and they laughed.

"All right," he said. "But in public . . ."

She touched his arm gently. "In public it shall be as always." She lifted her chin in imitation of an old, starchy courtier. "We'll be as tight laced as a minister's corsets!"

He giggled, unable to help himself, then saw she was watching him, enjoying his laughter.

"Come, Yuan. Let's go down."

She let him take her arm. A flight of stone steps snaked steeply downward, following the slope, ending with a tiny bridge of stone. But the bridge was only wide enough for one to cross at a time. Li Yuan went first, then turned, holding out his hand to help her across the tiny stream.

She took his hand and let him draw her to him, brushing past him closely, then turned to look back at him, her face in full sunlight for the first time since he had met her in the bower.

"What's that?"

She began to smile, then saw the look on his face. "It's a mian ye. A beauty mark, that's all. Why, don't you like it?"

He made the slightest movement of his head, reluctant to find anything about her less than perfect.

"Here, wipe it off!"

He took the silk handkerchief she offered him, realizing at once that it was the twin to the one he had in his room, beneath his pillow. Resisting the temptation to put it to his face, he reached out and made to touch the mark, but Fei Yen laughed and pushed his hand away.

"Come here, Li Yuan! How can you do it from over there? You'll Ijave to hold my cheek while you rub the mark away. It isn't easy, you know!"

He moved closer, then gently took her cheek and turned it, almost fearing to hurt her. His body was touching hers now, brushing against her, and he could feel her warmth and smell the scent of plum blossom on her clothes. He felt a slight shiver pass down his spine, then began, brushing at it, gently at first, then harder, licking the silk, then dabbing it against her cheek, until the mark was gone.

And all the while she was watching him, a strange, unreadable expression in her dark, beautiful eyes. He was conscious of her breathing: of her warm breath on his neck; of the soft rise and fall of her breasts beneath the tightly fitting tunic; of the warm pulse of her body where it touched his own.

He shuddered and moved away, bringing his hand back from her face; looking down at it a moment, as if it wasn't his. Then, recollecting himself, he offered her the silk.

Her smile, her answer, made him burn. "Keep it. Put it with its twin."

He swallowed, then smiled and gave a small bow of thanks.

On the terrace she stood there, her hands on the balcony, looking out across the lake. "Do you still want to ride?"

He looked away, a faint color in his cheeks, remembering what Pearl Heart had said.

"What is it?" she asked, touching his shoulder gently.

"Nothing," he said, then laughed and changed the subject. "Do you remember that day here, on the far side of the lake? The day of the reception?"

She looked across and nodded, her mouth opening slightly, showing her perfect white teeth. "The day I let Han beat me at archery."

They were silent a moment, a strange mix of emotions in the air between them. Then she turned back to him, smiling.

"Let's go across. I'm not in the mood for riding. Let's walk, and talk of old times, eh, Yuan?"

He looked up shyly at her, then smiled. "Yes. I'd like that. I'd like that very much."

FOR A LONG TIME after Li Yuan had gone, Fei Yen stood there at the edge of the lake, staring out across the water, deep in thought.

She had thought it would be amusing to play an ancient game: to flirt with him and maybe afterward, in some secret place away from prying eyes, introduce him to pleasures finer than those his maids could offer. But Li Yuan had wanted more than that. Much more, despite the impossibility of it.

She could still hear his voice echoing in her head.

"Your son will be T'ang."

Had he seen her surprise? Had he seen how unprepared she was for that? Her laughter had been designed to put him off; to make him think she thought it all a joke, when she could see from his eyes how serious he was.

"Impossible," she had said when he repeated it. "You know the law, Li Yuan."

"You slept with him? Is that what you're saying?"

"What?" She had turned, flustered, shocked by his impropriety. "What do you mean?"

He seemed obsessed with it; insistent. "Did you sleep with him? Before the wedding? It is important, Fei Yen. Did you or didn't you?"

She swallowed and looked down, flushing deeply at the neck. "No! How could I have done? There was never an opportunity. And then . . ."

Her tears made him relent. But in the breathing space they earned her, she began to understand. The law said that a man could not marry his brother's wife. But was a wife really a wife until the marriage had been consummated?

She had looked up at him, wide eyed: astonished both that he wanted her and that he was prepared to challenge the law itself to have her.

"You understand me, then, Fei Yen?" he had said, and she had nodded, her whole being silenced by the enormity of what he was suggesting to her. His wife. He wanted her to be his wife. But they had had the chance to say no more than that, for then the old servant had come and brought the summons from his father, and he, suddenly more flustered than she, had bowed and gone at once, leaving things unresolved.

Your son will be T'ang.

Yes, she thought, tears of joy coming suddenly to her eyes. So it shall pass. As it was always meant to be.

HIS FATHER'S Chancellor, Chung Hu-yan, met him before the doors to the Hall of Eternal Truth. The huge doors were closed and guarded, the great wheel of the Ywe Lung towering over the man as he bowed to the boy.

"What is it, Hu-yan? What does my father want?"

But Chung Hu-yan was not his normal smiling self. He looked at Li Yuan strangely, almost sternly, then removed the boy's riding hat and turned him about full circle, inspecting him.

"I was going riding . . ." Li Yuan began to explain, but the Chancellor shook his head, as if to say, Be silent, boy.

Yuan swallowed. What had happened? Why was Hu-yan so stern and formal? Was it the business with the maids? Oh, gods, was it that?

Satisfied, Chung Hu-yan stepped back and signaled to the guards.

Two bells sounded, the first sweet and clear, the second deep and resonant. Slowly, noiselessly, the great doors swung back.

Yuan stared down the aisle of the Great Hall and shivered. What was going on? Why did his father not meet with him in his rooms, as he had always done? Why all this sudden ritual?

Li Shai Tung sat on his throne atop the Presence Dais at the far end of the Hall.

"Prostrate yourself, Li Yuan," Ghung Hu-yan whispered, and Yuan did as he was bid, making the full k'o t'ou to his father for the first time since the day of the reception—the day of the archery contest.

He stood slowly, the cold touch of the tiles lingering like a ghostly presence against his brow. Then, with the briefest glance at Chung Hu-yan, he moved forward, between the pillars, approaching his father.

Halfway down the aisle he noticed the stranger who stood to one side of the Presence Dais at the bottom of the steps. A tall, thin Han with a shaven head, who wore the sienna robes of a scholar, but on whose chest was a patch of office.

He stopped at the foot of the steps and made his obeisance once again, then stood and looked up at the T'ang.

"You asked for me, Father?"

His father was dressed in the formal robe he normally wore only for ministerial audiences, the bright yellow cloth edged in black and decorated with fierce golden dragons. The high-tiered court crown made him seem even taller than he was; more dignified, if that was possible. When Li Yuan addressed him he gave the barest nod of recognition, his face, like Chung Hu-yan's, curiously stem, uncompromising. This was not how he usually greeted his son.

Li Shai Tung studied his son a moment, then leaned forward and pointed to the Han who stood below the steps.

"This is Ssu Lu Shan. He has something to tell you about the world. Go with him, Li Yuan."

Li Yuan turned to the man and gently inclined his head, showing his respect. At once the scholar bowed low, acknowledging Li Yuan's status as a prince. Li Yuan turned back, facing his father, waiting, expecting more, then understood the audience was at an end. He made his k'o t'ou a third and final time, then backed away, puzzled and deeply troubled by the strict formality of his father's greeting, the oddness of his instruction.

Outside, Li Yuan turned and faced the stranger, studying him. He had the thin, pinched face of a New Confucian official; a face made longer by the bareness of the scalp. His eyes, however, were hard and practical. They met Li Yuan's examination unflinchingly.

"Tell me, Ssu Lu Shan. What ministry is it that you wear the patch of?"

Ssu Lu Shan bowed. "It is The Ministry, Prince Yuan." From another it might have seemed cryptic, but Li Yuan understood at once that there was nothing elusive in the man's answer.

"The Ministry?"

"So it is known, Excellency."

Li Yuan walked on, Ssu Lu Shan keeping up with him, several paces behind, as protocol demanded.

At the doorway to his suite of rooms, Li Yuan stopped and turned to face the man again.

"Do we need privacy for our meeting, Ssu Lu Shan?"

The man bowed. "It would be best, Excellency. What I have to say is for your ears only. I would prefer it if the doors were locked and the windows closed while I am talking."

Li Yuan hesitated, feeling a vague unease. But this was what his father wanted; what his father had ordered him to do. And if his father had ordered it, he must trust this man and accommodate him.

When the doors were locked and the windows closed, Ssu Lu Shan turned, facing him. Li Yuan sat in a tall chair by the window overlooking the gardens while the scholar—if that was what he was—stood on the far side of the room, breathing deeply, calmly, preparing himself.

Dust motes floated slowly in the still warm air of the room as Ssu Lu Shan began, his voice deep, authoritative, and clear as polished jade, telling the history of Chung Kuo—the true history—beginning with Pan Chao's arrival on the shores of the Caspian Sea in A. D. 94 and his subsequent withdrawal, leaving Europe to the Ta Ts'in, the Roman Empire.

Hours passed and still Ssu Lu Shan spoke on, telling of a Europe Li Yuan had never dreamed existed—a Europe racked by Dark Ages and damned by religious bigotry, enlightened by the Renaissance, then torn again by wars of theology, ideology, and nationalism; a Europe swept up, finally, by the false ideal of technological progress, born of the Industrial Revolution; an ideal fueled by the concept of evolution and fanned by population pressures into the fire of Change—Change at any price.

And what had Chung Kuo done meanwhile but enclose itself behind great walls? Like a bloated maggot it had fed upon itself until, when the West had come, it had found the Han Empire weak, corrupt, and ripe for conquest.

So they came to the Century of Change, to the Great Wars, to the long years of revolution in Chung Kuo, and finally to the Pacific Century and the decline and fall of the American Empire, ending in the chaos of the Years of Blood.

This, the closest to the present, was, for Li Yuan, the worst of it, and as if he sensed this, Ssu Lu Shan's voice grew softer as he told of the tyrant Tsao Ch'un and his "Crusade of Purity," of the building of the City and, finally, of The Ministry and the burning of the books, the burial of the past.

"As you know, Prince Yuan, Tsao Ch'un wished to create a Utopia that would last ten thousand years—to bring into being the world beyond the peach-blossom river, as we Han have traditionally known it. But the price of its attainment was high."

Ssu Lu Shan paused, his eyes momentarily dark with the pain of what he had witnessed on ancient newsreels. Then, slowly, he began again.

"In 2062 Japan, Chung Kuo's chief rival in the East, was the first victim of Tsao Ch'un's barbaric methods when, without warning—after Japanese complaints about Han incursions in Korea—the Han leader bombed Honshu, concentrating his nuclear devices on the major population centers of Tokyo and Kyoto. Over the next eight years three great Han armies swept the smaller islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, destroying everything and killing every Japanese they found, while the rest of Japan was blockaded by sea and air. Over the following twenty years they did the same with the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, turning the 'islands of the gods' into a wasteland.

"While this was happening, the crumbling Western nation states were looking elsewhere, obsessed with their own seemingly insuperable problems. Chung Kuo alone of all the Earth's nations remained stable, and, as the years passed, grew quickly at the expense of others.

"The eradication of Japan taught Tsao Ch'un many lessons, yet only one other time was he to use similar methods. In future he sought, in his famous phrase, 'not to destroy but to exclude'—though his definition of exclusion often made it a synonym for destruction. As he built his great City—the huge machines moving slowly outward from Pei Ching, building the living sections—so he peopled it, choosing carefully who was to live within its walls. His criteria, like his methods, were not merely crude but idiosyncratic, reflecting not merely his wish to make his great City free of all those human troubles that had plagued previous social experiments, but also his deeply held hatred of the black and aboriginal races."

Noting Li Yuan's surprise, Ssu Lu Shan nodded soberly. "Yes, Prince Yuan, there were once whole races of black men. Men no more different from ourselves than the Hung Mao. Billions of them."

He lowered his eyes, then continued. "Well, as^the City grew so his men went out, questioning, searching among the Hung Moo for those who were free from physical disability, political dissidence, religious bigotry, and intellectual pride. And where he encountered organized opposition he enlisted the aid of groups sympathetic to his aims. In southern Africa and North America, in Europe and in the People's Democracy of Russia, huge popular movements grew up among the Hung Mao supporting Tsao Ch'un and welcoming his stability after decades of bitter suffering. Many of them were only too pleased to share in his crusade of intolerance—his 'Policy of Purity.' In the so-called 'civilized' West, particularly, Tsao Ch'un often found that his work had been done for him long before his officials arrived.

"Only the Middle East proved problematic. There a great jihad was launched against the Han, Moslem and Jew casting off millennia of enmity to fight against a common threat. Tsao Ch'un answered them harshly, as he had answered Japan. The Middle East and large parts of the Indian subcontinent were swiftly reduced to the wilderness they remain to this day. But it was in Africa that Tsao Ch'un's policies were most nakedly displayed. There the native peoples were moved on before the encroaching City, and, like cattle in a desert, they starved or died from exhaustion, driven on relentlessly by a brutal Han army.

"Tsao Ch'un's ideal was, he believed, a high one. He sought to eradicate the root causes of human dissidence and fulfill all material needs. Yet in terms of human suffering, his pacification of the Earth was unprecedented. It was a grotesquely flawed ideal, and more than three billion people died as a direct result of his policies."

Ssu Lu Shan met the young Prince's eyes again, a strange resignation in his own. "Tsao Ch'un killed the old world. He buried it deep beneath his glacial City. But eventually his brutality and tyranny proved too much even for those who had helped him carry out his scheme. In 2087 his Council of Seven Ministers rose up against him, using North European mercenaries, and overthrew him, setting up a new government. They divided the world—Chung Kuo—among themselves, each calling himself T'ang. The rest you know. The rest, since then, is true."

In the silence that followed, Li Yuan sat there perfectly still, staring blankly at the air in front of him. He could see the stern faces of his father and his father's Chancellor, and understood them now. They had known this moment lay before him. Had known how he would feel.

He shuddered and looked down at his hands where they clasped each other in his lap—so far away from him, they seemed. A million li from the dark, thinking center of himself. Yes. But what did he feel?

A nothingness. A kind of numbness at the core of him. Almost an absence of feeling. He felt hollow, his limbs brittle like the finest porcelain. He turned his head, facing Ssu Lu Shan again, and even the simple movement of his neck muscles seemed suddenly false, unreal. He shivered and focused on the waiting man.

"Did my brother know of this?"

Ssu Lu Shan shook his head. It was as if he had done with words.

"I see." He looked down. "Then why has my father chosen to tell me now? Why should I, at my age, know what Han Ch'in at his did not?"

When Ssu Lu Shan did not answer him, Li Yuan looked up again. He frowned. It was as if the Han were in some kind of trance.

"Ssu Lu Shan?"

The man's eyes focused on him, but still he said nothing.

"Have you done?"

Ssu Lu Shan's sad smile was extraordinary: as if all he was, all he knew, were gathered up into that small, ironic smile. "Almost," he answered softly. "There's one last thing."

Li Yuan raised a hand, commanding him to be silent. "A question first. My father sent you, I know. But how do I know that what you've told me today is true? What proof have you?"

Ssu Lu Shan looked down a moment and Li Yuan's eyes followed their movement, then widened as he saw the knife he had drawn from the secret fold in his scholar's pau.

"Ssu Lu Shan!" he cried out, jumping up, suddenly alert to the danger he was in, alone in a locked room with an armed stranger.

But Ssu Lu Shan paid him no attention. He lowered himself onto his knees and laid the knife on the floor in front of him. While Li Yuan watched he untied the fastenings of his robe and pulled it up over his head, then bundled it together between his legs. Except for a loincloth he was naked now.

Li Yuan swallowed. "What is this?" he said softly, beginning to understand.

Ssu Lu Shan looked up at him. "You ask what proof I have. This now is my proof." His eyes were smiling strangely, as if with relief at the shedding of a great and heavy burden carried too long. "This, today, was the purpose of my life. Well, now I have fulfilled my purpose, and the laws of Chung Kuo deem my life forfeit for the secrets I have uttered in this room. So it is. So it must be. For they are great, grave secrets."

Li Yuan shivered. "I understand, Ssu Lu Shan. But surely there is another way than this?"

Ssu Lu Shan did not answer him. Instead he looked down, taking a long breath that seemed to restore his inner calm. Then, picking up the knife again, he readied himself, breathing deeply, slowly, the whole of him concentrated on the point of the knife where it rested, perfectly still, only a hand's length from his stomach.

Li Yuan wanted to cry out; to step forward and stop Ssu Lu Shan, but he knew this, too, was part of it. Part of the lesson. To engrave it in his memory. For they are great, grave secrets. He shivered violently. Yes, he understood. Even this.

"May your spirit soul rise up to Heaven," he said, blessing Ssu Lu Shan. He knelt and bowed deeply to him, honoring him for what he was about to do. " "Thank you, Prince Yuan," Ssu Lu Shan said softly, almost in a whisper, pride at the honor the young Prince did him making his smile widen momentarily. Then, with a sharp intake of breath, he thrust the knife deep into his flesh.

IT WAS NOT until halfway through the fourth game that DeVore raised the matter.

"Well, Tong Chou? Have you dealt with our thief?"

Chen met the Overseer's eyes and gave the briefest nod. It had been a dreadful job and it was not pleasant to be reminded of it. He had been made to feel unclean; a brother to the Tengs of the world.

"Good," DeVore said. He leaned forward and connected two of his groups, .then turned the board about. "Play white from here, Tong Chou."

It was the fourth time it had happened and DeVore had yet to lose a game, despite being each time in what seemed an impossible position as black.

Yes, Chen thought. Karr was right after all. But you're not just a master at this game—it is as if the game were invented for one like you. He smiled inwardly and placed the first of his stones as white.

There was the same ruthlessness in him. The same cold calculation. DeVore did not think in terms of love and hate and relationships but in terms of advantage and groups and sacrifice. He played life as if it were one big game of wei chi.

And perhaps that's your weakness, Chen thought, studying him a moment. Perhaps that's where you're inflexible. For men are not stones, and life is not a game. You cannot order it thus and thus and thus, or connect it thus and thus and thus. Nor does your game take account of accident or chance.

Chen looked down again, studying the board, looking for the move or sequence of moves that would make his position safe. White had three corners and at least forty points advantage. It was his strongest position yet: how could he lose from this?

Even so, he knew that he would lose. He sighed and sat back. It was as if he were looking at a different board from the one DeVore was studying. It was as if the other man saw through to the far side of the board, on which were placed—suspended in the darkness—the stones yet to be played.

He shivered, feeling suddenly uneasy, and looked down at the tube he had brought with him.

"By the way, Tong Chou, what is that thing?"

DeVore had been watching him; had seen where his eyes went.

Chen picked it up and hefted it, then handed it across. He had been surprised DeVore had not insisted on looking at the thing straightaway. This was his first mention of it in almost two hours.

"It's something I thought might amuse you. I brought it with me from the Above. It!s a viewing tube. You manipulate the end of it and place your eye to the lens at this end."

"Like this?"

Chen held his breath. There! It was done! DeVore had placed his eye against the lens! The imprint would be perfect! Chen let his breath out slowly, afraid to give away his excitement.

"Interesting," said DeVore and set it down again, this time on his side of the board. "I wonder who she was."

The image was of a high-class Hung Mao lady, her dress drawn up about her waist, being "tupped" from the rear by one of the GenSyn ox-men, its huge, fifteen-inch member sliding in and out of her while she grimaced ecstatically.

Chen stared at the tube for a time, wondering whether to ask for it back, then decided not to. The imprint might be perfect, but it was better to lose the evidence than have DeVore suspicious.

For a while he concentrated on the game. Already it was beginning to slip from him, the tide to turn toward the black. He made a desperate play in the center of the board, trying to link, and found himself cut not once but twice.

DeVore laughed. "I must make those structures stronger next time," he said. "It's unfair of me to pass on such weaknesses to you."

Chen swallowed, suddenly understanding. At some point in the last few games he had become, if not superfluous, then certainly secondary to the game DeVore was playing against himself. Like a machine with a slight unpredictability factor built into its circuits.

He let his eyes rest on the tube a moment, then looked up at DeVore. "Does my play bore you, Shih Bergson?"

DeVore sniffed. "What do you think, long Chou?"

Chen met his eyes, letting a degree of genuine admiration color his expression. "I think my play much too limited for you, Overseer Bergson. I am but a humble player, but you, Shift Bergson, are a master. It would not surprise me to find you were the First Hand Supreme in all Chung Kuo."

DeVore laughed. "In this, as in all things, there are levels, long Chou. It is true, I find your game limited, predictable, and perhaps I have tired of it already. But I am not quite what you make me out to be. There are others—a dozen, maybe more— who can better me at this game, and of them there is one, a man named Tuan Ti Fo, who was once to me as I am to you. He alone deserves the title you conferred on me just now."

DeVore sat back, relaxed. "But you are right, long Chou. You lost the game two moves back. It would not do to labor the point, eh?" He half turned in his chair and leaned back into the darkness. "Well, Stefan? What do you think?"

The albino stepped out from the shadows at the far end of the room and came toward the table.

Chen's heart missed a beat. Gods! How long had he been there?

He edged back, instinctively afraid of the youth, and when the albino picked up the viewing tube and studied it, Chen tensed, believing himself discovered—certain, for that brief moment, that DeVore had merely been toying with him; that he had known him from the first.

"These GenSyn ox-men are ugly beasts, aren't they? Yet there's something human about them, even so."

The pale youth set the tube down then stared at Chen a moment: his pink eyes so cruel, so utterly inhuman in their appraisal, Chen felt the hairs on his neck stand on end.

"Well?" DeVore had sat back, watching the young man.

The albino turned to DeVore and gave the slightest shrug. "What do I know, Overseer Bergson? Make him field supervisor if it suits you. Someone must do the job."

His voice, like his flesh, was colorless. Even so, there was something strangely, disturbingly familiar about it. Something Chen could not, for the life of him, put his finger on just then.

DeVore watched the youth a moment longer, then turned, facing Chen again. "Well, Tong Chou. It seems the job is yours. You understand the duties?"

Chen nodded, forcing his face into a mask of gratitude; but the presence of the young albino had thrown him badly. He stood up awkwardly, almost upsetting the board, then backed off, bowing deeply.

"Should I leave, Overseer?"

DeVore was watching him almost absently. "Yes. Go now, Tong Chou. I think we're done."

Chen turned and took a step toward the door.

"Oh, and Tong Chou?"

He turned back slowly, facing DeVore again, fear tightening his chest and making his heart pound violently. Was this it? Was this the moment when he turned the board about?

But no. The Overseer was holding out the viewing tube, offering it to him across the board.

"Take this and bum it. Understand me? I'll have no filth on this plantation!"

WHEN THE PEASANT had gone, Lehmann came across and sat in the vacant seat, facing DeVore.

DeVore looked up at him. "Will you play, Stefan?" Lehmann shook his head curtly. "What was all that for?" DeVore smiled and continued transferring the stones into the bowls. "I had a hunch, that's all. I thought he might be something more, but it seems I'm wrong. He's just a stupid peasant." "How do you know?"

DeVore gave a short laugh. "The way he plays this game, for an opener. He's not pretending to be awkward, he is! YouVe seen his face when he concentrates on the board!"

DeVore pulled down his eyes at the corners and stretched his mouth exaggeratedly.

"So? He can't play wei chi. What does that mean?" DeVore had finished clearing the board. Taking a cloth from the pocket of his pau, he wiped the wood. "It means he's not Security. Even the basest recruit would play better than Tong Chou." He yawned and sat back, stretching out his arms behind him, his fingers interlaced. "I was just being a little paranoid, that's all."

"Again, I thought it was your policy to trust no one?"

DeVore smiled, his eyes half lidded now. "Yes. That's why I'm having his background checked out."

"Ah. . . ." Lehmann sat back, still watching him, his eyes never blinking, his stare quite unrelenting. "And the tube?"

DeVore shook his head. "That was nothing. He was just trying to impress me. These Han are strange, Stefan. They think all Hung Mao are beasts, with the appetites of beasts. Maybe it's true of some."

Yes, but he had wondered for a moment: had waited to see if Tong Chou would clamor for it back.

"You're certain of him, then?"

DeVore looked sharply at the youth. "And you're not?"

Lehmann shook his head. "You said you had a hunch. Why not trust to it? Have you ever been wrong?"

DeVore hesitated, reluctant to say, then nodded. "Once or twice. But never about something so important."

"Then why trust to luck now?"

When Lehmann was gone, he went upstairs and sat at his desk, beneath the sharp glare of the single lamp, thinking about what the albino had said. The unease he felt was understandable. Everything was in flux at present—The New Hope, the fortresses, the recent events in the House; all these demanded his concentration, night and day. Little wonder, then, that he should display a little paranoia now and then. Even so, the boy was right. It was wrong to ignore a hunch simply because the evidence wasn't there to back it up. Hunches were signs from the subconscious—reports from a game played deep down in the darkness.

Normally he would have had the man killed and thought nothing of it, but there were good reasons not to kill Tong Chou just now. Reports of unrest were serious enough as it was, and had brought inquiries from Duchek's own office. Another death was sure to bring things to a head. But it was important that things were kept quiet for the next few days, until his scheme to pay that bastard Duchek back was finalized and the funds transferred from his accounts.

Yes. And he wanted to get even with Administrator Duchek. Because Duchek had let him down badly when he had refused to launder the funds for the Swiss Wilds fortresses through his accounts. Had let them all down.

Even so, there was a way that he could deal with Tong Chou. An indirect way that would cause the very minimum of fuss.

The dead thief had three brothers. They, certainly, would be keen to know who it was had put their brother in the ground. And who was to say who had left the anonymous note?

DeVore smiled, satisfied that he had found the solution to one of his problems, then leaned forward and tapped out the combination of the discrete line that connected him directly with Berdichev.

"Do you know what time it is, Howard?"

"Two twenty. Why? Were you sleeping, Soren?"

Berdichev waved his wife, Ylva, away, then locked the door behind her and came back to the screen. "What's so urgent?"

"We need to talk."

"What about?"

DeVore paused, conscious of the possibility the call was being traced—especially after the events of the past few days. "I'll tell you when I see you."

"Which is when?"

"In an hour and a half."

"Ah. . . ." Berdichev removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, then looked up again and nodded. "Okay." Then he cut contact. There was no need to say where they would meet. Both knew.

An hour and a half later they stood there on the mountainside below the landing dome at Landek Base. The huge valley seemed mysterious and threatening in the moonlight, the distant mountains strange and unreal. It was like being on another planet. Berdichev had brought furs against the cold; even so he felt chilled to the bone, his face numbed by the thin, frigid air.

He faced DeVore, noting how little the other man seemed to be wearing.

"So? What do we need to talk about?"

His voice seemed small and hollow; dwarfed by the immensity of their surroundings.

"About everything. But mainly about Duchek. Have you heard from Weis?"

Berdichev nodded, wishing he could see DeVore's face better. He had expected DeVore to be angry, maybe even to have had Duchek killed for what he had done. "I was disappointed in him, Howard."

"Good. I'd hate to think you were pleased."

Berdichev smiled tightly. "What did you want to do?"

"Wrong question, Soren. Try 'What have you done?' "

"So?"

"He's dead. Two days from now. Next time he visits his favorite singsong house. But there's something else I want to warn you about. I've got a team switching funds from the plantation accounts here. At the same time Duchek greets his ancestors there'll be a big fire in the Distribution Center at Lodz. It'll spread and destroy the computer records there. I thought I'd warn you, in case it hurts any of our investors. It'll be messy and there'll doubtlessly be a few hiccups before they can reconstruct things from duplicate records."

"Is that wise, Howard?"

DeVore smiled. "My experts estimate it'll take them between six and eight weeks to sort out the bulk of it. By that time I'll be out of there and the funds will have been tunneled away, so to speak. Then we cut Weis out of it."

Berdichev narrowed his eyes. "Cut Weis out?"

"Yes. He's the weak link. We both know it. Duchek's betrayal gives me the excuse to deal with them both."

Berdichev considered a moment, then nodded, seeing the sense in it. With Weis dead, the trail covered, and the fortresses funded, what did it matter if they traced the missing plantation funds to Duchek? Because beyond Duchek there would be a vacuum. And Duchek himself would be dead.

"How much is involved?"

"Three billion. Maybe three and a half."

"Three billion. Hmm. With that we could take some of the pressure off our investors."

DeVore shook his head. "No. That would just alert Weis. I gave him the distinct impression that we were grabbing for every fen we could lay our hands on. If we start making refunds he'll know weVe got funding from elsewhere and he'll start looking for it. No, I want you to go to him with the begging bowl again. Make him think things are working out over budget."

Berdichev frowned. "And if he says it can't be done?"

DeVore laughed and reached out to touch his arm. "Be persuasive."

"Right. You want me to pressure him?"

DeVore nodded. "How are things otherwise?"

"Things are good. Under Secretary Barrow tells me that the tai are to face impeachment charges next week. Until then they're suspended from the House. That gives our coalition an effective majority. Lo Yu-Hsiang read out a strongly worded protest from the Seven yesterday, along with an announcement that funding in certain areas was to be cut. But we expected as much. Beyond that they're impotent to act—as we knew they would be. The House is humming with it, Howard. TheyVe had a taste of real power for once and they like it. They like it a lot."

"Good. And the file?"

For a moment Berdichev thought to play dumb. Then, seeing how things stood, he shrugged inwardly, making a mental note to find out how DeVore had come to know of it. It was fortunate that, for once, he had prepared for such an eventuality. "IVe a copy in my craft for you, Howard. I'll hand it to you before we go."

"Excellent. And the boy? Kim, isn't it? Have you sorted out your problems there?"

Berdichev felt his stomach tighten. Was there anything DeVore hadn't heard about? "It's no problem," he said defensively.

"Good. Because we don't wantfiroblems. Not for the next few days, anyway."

Berdichev took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax. "And how is young Stefan? How is he settling in?"

DeVore turned his head away, staring out at the mountains, the moonlight momentarily revealing his neat, rather handsome features. "Fine. Absolutely fine. He's quiet, but I rather like that. It shows he has depths." He looked back, giving Berdichev the briefest glimpse of a smile.

Yes, thought Berdichev, recalling the two appalling weeks the boy had spent with them as a houseguest; he has depths all right—vacuous depths.

"I see. But has he learned anything from you, Howard? Anything useful?"

DeVore laughed, then looked away thoughtfully. "Who knows, Soren? Who knows?"

THE HUGE BED was draped with veils of silk-white voile, -the thin, gauzelike cotton decorated with butterflies and delicate, tall-stemmed irises. It filled one end of the large, sumptuously decorated room, like the cocoon of some vast exotic insect.

The air in the room was close, the sweet, almost sickly scent of old perfumes, masking another, darker odor.

The woman lay on the bed, amid a heap of pale cream and salmon-pink satin cushions which blended with the colors of the silk shui t'an i camisole she wore. As he came closer, she raised her head. The simple movement seemed to cost her dearly, as if her head were weighted down with bronze.

"Who is it?"

Her voice had a slightly brittle edge to it, a huskiness beneath its silken surface.

He stood where he was, looking about the room, noting with disgust its excesses. "I am from Shih Bergson, Fu Jen Maitland."

"You're new. . . ." she said sleepily, a faintly seductive intonation entering her voice. "Come here where I can see you, boy."

He went across and climbed the three small steps that led up to the bed, then drew the veil aside, looking down at her.

She was a tall, long-limbed woman with knife-sharp, nervous facial features, their glasslike fragility accentuated rather than hidden by the heavy pancake of makeup she was wearing. She looked old before her time, the web of lines about each eye like the cracked earth of a dried-up stream, her eyeballs protruding slightly beneath their thin veils of flesh. The darkness of her hair, he knew at once, had been achieved artificially, for the skin of her neck and arms had the pallor of albinism.

Yes, he could see now where his own coloring came from.

Bracelets of fine gold wire were bunched about her narrow wrists, jeweled rings clustered on her long, fragile fingers. About her stretched and bony neck she wore a garishly large ying lo, the fake rubies and emeralds like pigeons' eggs. Her hair was unkempt from troubled sleep, her silks creased. She looked what she was—a rich Han's concubine. A kept woman.

He watched her turn her head slowly and open her eyes. Pale, watery blue eyes that had to make an effort before they focused on him.

"Ugh . . . pale as a worm. Still. . ." She closed her eyes again, letting her head sink back among the cushions. "What's your name?"

"Mikhail," he said, adopting the alias he had stolen from DeVore. "Mikhail Boden."

She was silent a moment, then gave a small, shuddering sigh and turned slightly, raising herself onto her elbows, looking at him again. The movement made her camisole fall open slightly at the front, exposing her small, pale breasts.

"Come here. Sit beside me, boy."

He did as he was bid, the perfumed reek of her filling his nostrils, sickening him. It was like her jewelry, her silks and satins, the makeup and nail polish. All this—this ostentation—offended him deeply. He himself wore nothing decorative. His belief was in purity. In essence.